


Old and Stupid

by Swagreus (shiplizard)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ballad 39: Tam Lin, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Repression, Extremely Gaelic-American Jack Morrison, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Flagrant abuse of the Childe Ballads, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-01 06:46:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 39,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13992720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/Swagreus
Summary: Soldier: 76 doesn't lose his heart to magic, the way Jesse McCree did, the way Gabriel Reyes did. No, he does it the hard way. The traditional way. He makes himself heartless by choice.Set in the world of Asheryder's 'Heartless', this is a story about two emotionally constipated bastards who loved each other once. They were each other's downfall; now they might be each other's salvation, despite their best attempts to the contrary.





	1. Ghosts and Soldiers

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Heartless](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13562304) by [AsheRhyder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsheRhyder/pseuds/AsheRhyder). 



> If you don't know Heartless, first go read Heartless-- but if you need a refresher, it's a universe where Jesse McCree and a few other poor bastards had their hearts cut out to grant them immortality, in the proud tradition of the Russian fairytale character Koschei the Deathless.
> 
> This fic was written with the permission of AsheRyder, but shouldn't be taken as Heartless canon, since they have their own R76 sequel planned. I've taken some liberties with the timeline of Heartless and Overwatch's canonical timeline-- I kid, we know there's no such thing. 
> 
> Big thanks to [AsheRyder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsheRhyder/pseuds/AsheRhyder) for letting me play in their sandbox and to [Fakkin_Drongo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fakkin_drongo/pseuds/fakkin_drongo) for being my beta and gently restraining my tendency to equate 'magical realism' with 'weird sentence structure and overcomplicated metaphor'. 
> 
> The Tam Lin storyline doesn't really even kick in until the second chapter, because lord knows I don't know how to stop writing.

There are plenty of ways to become heartless. 

Of course heart here also means ‘humanity’-- it doesn’t have to be the organ itself that goes missing, just the life in it, the essence of you. It's almost as easy as dying, if you're unlucky.

Soldier 76 doesn’t run afoul of the usual traps-- he doesn’t cannibalize a friend in the snow, doesn’t promise too much, doesn’t bargain with strangers, doesn’t trespass where he shouldn’t. Soldier 76 does not have the heart cut from his chest and locked away.

Day by day and breath by breath 76 becomes heartless the hard way. 

He chooses heartlessness. He chooses sterility, cruel utilitarianism. He sharpens himself into a tool and turns it on his enemies. 

Jesse McCree lost his heart in the inimitably slavic way-- had it cut neatly out of his chest, hidden away to make him immortal. His warm boyish eyes went cold, at the end of the first Overwatch, his smiling mouth went flat. 

When 76 meets McCree again, after the Recall, he sees himself in a cracked mirror, because McCree chooses too-- where 76 still has a heart beating tunelessly against his ribs, and chooses to be merciless, McCree has a gaping pit where his emotions should be, and he chooses to be good. 

He chooses, breath by breath, to be everything that 76 is not. 

76 chooses not to be proud of Blackwatch's little lost lamb. He chooses not to be relieved. He smothers the feelings as in the cradle, uproots them like saplings.

Jesse looks at his mask and frowns. Maybe he knows. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he just disapproves generally of the Soldier’s gruff manner and cold calculations. 

Of those in the new Overwatch who knew him, only Fareeha definitely knows who he is already, and she doesn’t ask. He isn’t the old soldier she wants. Mercy suspects, but doesn't know until the night he staggers into the medbay with shards of his visor embedded in his face after a mission gone bust; she sucks in a breath when he takes the mask off, but treats him wordlessly.

It's afterwards that she flinches; afterwards when he looks at her like a stranger and nods only a curt, obligatory thanks. That's when she understands; Jack Morrison is dead. 76 is what built itself from his bones, a scarecrow, a machine stripped down to the essential functions. 

She examines him intently after every battle, scanning him with tools both scientific and otherwise, trying to understand what’s happened to him, and he doesn’t waste his breath telling her not to bother. 

* * *

In Giza the Reaper shoots him in the back, and then the Shrike shoots him in the neck, and 76’s suspicions are confirmed; he's not the only walking corpse on this battlefield.

Gabriel Reyes died under the rubble in Zurich; his ghost prowls the old battlefield, shedding smoke like the barrels of his shotguns. Ana Amari took a bullet in the eye; her spirit protects the just and the innocent like a household god. Morrison’s old friends are alive, in a way. 

76 crushes the seeds of grief and joy before they bloom.

He calls Ana back to Overwatch, because they need her, and for no other reason. 

Fareeha weeps when her mother reappears; wails, screams, shouts, storms away, storms back, falls into her mother's arms. Ana cries for her daughter, cries for her old friends, puts her wizened hand on McCree's breastplate and looks into his eyes and says _Oh, Habibi, oh, little cowboy, what did they do?_ Jesse tips his hat to her, and takes her hand, and says _It's all right, captain, it don't hurt,_ with his hollow gentility, and Ana weeps for him too.

76 watches this dry-eyed and excuses himself when the job is done. Jack Morrison loved Ana with the loyalty of a soldier and the warmth of a brother. That love lies rusting now, untouched, where Morrison fell.

* * *

76 has learned all he can in Dorado; now, without a mission from Overwatch to occupy him, he moves between old safe-houses and new bolt-holes, following a trail north. He gets a lead on a facility in Wyoming, a shuttered old factory that is no longer shuttered, and he spends three days watching trucks with Vishkar logos glide in and out, memorizing faces and taking down plates. He does not engage. He waits like a stone. He'll track one of these rabbits back to its den, and shake the information out of it, see why Vishkar is supplying a facility owned by a Talon shell corporation. 

When he returns to the old safehouse, he finds his meager traveling pack flung out onto the lawn.

He goes through his duffel, looking for audio equipment, a transponder, an explosive-- finding nothing, he shoulders the bag and strolls back in with only a little wary caution for company.

The lights go out-- which would be more menacing if it weren't midday, and the house hadn’t been built with secure but functional windows. Darkness pools along the floor like a sullen mist, unable to completely shroud the chipped paint and battered wooden paneling. 

"Get out," Reaper hisses, only visible as two red eyes in the darkest corner of the living room.

Gabriel always had such a flare for the dramatic. It catches 76 in the chest, a ball of pain that tastes of tears and laughter, and he has to breathe deeply and put all his strength into snuffing it out.

"You first."

"This is my place."

"This is a decommissioned Blackwatch safehouse," 76 corrects.

"Blackwatch was mine."

"You died. And Jack Morrison was your next of kin." He can hang on a technicality with the best of them. Technicalities have weight. Generations of Morrisons have come and gone since they left Scotland but each generation has passed down to the next the old understanding that there are Rules and the Rules may be all that save you. 

"Jack died too."

"I'm not leaving." He drops his duffel firmly into the unnatural gloom where he knows the recliner is, and returns his pulse rifle to the straps on his thigh. "I have as much right as you to be here."

"I should kill you."

He should, come to think of it. Why hasn't he, yet? 76 isn't putting up a fight.

And speaking of that-- why isn't he putting up a fight? He realizes he holstered his weapon without thinking about it, acting on some old instinct he couldn’t catch and cauterize. What does his subconscious know that he hasn’t let himself think yet?

"Talon doesn't know you're here," he realizes. He wasn’t attacked, or ambushed-- he was thrown out. That’s not a Talon strategy, that’s a Gabe-in-a-pissy-mood strategy. 

"Talon hasn't asked." It's almost smug, but not nearly the way it should be. Gabriel Reyes could be smug as a cat when he’d pulled a fast one. There’s a depth of satisfaction missing, and it brings 76 to alert. 

Reaper's voice is hollow, rattles around behind his mask the same way McCree's cordial baritone resonates in the empty space of his chest.

"...what happened to you?"

"What do you think, Jackie?" Reaper ignores his curt headshake at the misnomer. "What do you think happened? When they got their hands on me, what do you think they did, after they got so good practicing on the Ingrate?” 

"I thought you had wards, after what they did to McCree."

"The wards died with me. Unlike me, they didn’t come back." A humourless laugh, an obligatory sound to fill the silence. "And now Talon has my heart for safekeeping. I couldn't be more secure."

It takes so much to smother the scream welling up in him that he almost shakes with the effort. All that he was is trying to howl with rage, all that Jack Morrison is wants to drag the wraith close and swear vengeance for him, with him, they took his lover's heart _they took his heart and they still have it_ .

76 excises the feeling like a tumor, with fire and steel and acid, he carves out another piece of himself. Vestigial; needless; old and stupid and useless in the fight. 

"Guess you weren't as smart as you thought you were," he says calmly.

Reaper cocks his head at him, the glowing eyes behind the mask taking in the cold shredded pieces of him.

"Guess you got smarter, after all this time."

76 nods.

"Did you throw out the beer I left in the fridge?"

"No."

"Do you want one?"

"It doesn't do anything for me anymore."

"But do you want one," 76 says, irritated that he has to ask twice, turning his inner gaze away from the thought that he should not offer, that there's no utility in wasting beer on someone who won't drink. He's exhausted, though. This ugly bloom of sentiment is a weed he can pull tomorrow. One beer isn't too much a lapse in the grand scheme of things.

"...yeah."

He gets two bottles, opening one on the counter, watching with tactical interest as Reaper tries to pop the cap free-- every time he gets leverage with one of his claws, his fingers dissolve into impotent wisps of smoke.

76 holds out a hand, after he's learned what he needs to and the spectacle has gotten old. Reaper fumbles the bottle into his grip.

Where their fingers touch-- through gloves and gauntlet-- Reaper's form remains solid. 76 frowns and shifts his grip, testing, but the clawed fingers don't dissolve.

"Huh," Reaper says, bemused, finally withdrawing his fingers.

76 grunts. He pops the bottle with his belt buckle and passes it back.

This time it's Reaper who twines their grips and won't let go, tipping the bottle back and forth and looking intently at their joined hands. The metal fingers of the gauntlet slide under 76's palm, tangibly cool through his leather glove, and he remembers Gabriel's fingers twining with Jack's-- like a lossy, jerky old movie file, with no emotions attached to it, but he remembers.

They stay that way for too long.

"I think I miss loving you," Reaper says thoughtfully.

"Don't," 76 says sharply, and pulls his hand away.

Reaper shrugs agreeably, and the absence of expectation is like a weight sliding off of him.

That night he sleeps in the safehouse bed; he can smell Reaper cleaning his shotguns in the next room. It catches him unaware, sneaks up as he hovers between sleep and waking-- some part of him relaxes and murmurs _Gabe_.

In the morning, he eats an MRE omelette that tastes mostly like cardboard, and doesn't offer any to Reaper. 

"Going to tell Talon I was here?" he asks, between mouthfuls. 

"If they ask." Reaper's mask gives away nothing, but neither of them needs it explained.

There won't be a choice, if they ask. They control him. They have his heart. 76 nods.

"Going to sic Overwatch on me?" Reaper counters. 

"If I need to.”

The mask nods agreeably. They understand each other.

76 comes back to the Wyoming safehouse three more times; it's a place of safety when Dorado gets hot, when there are one too many eyes after him and the beating sun gets to be too much.

The first time he returns, Reaper simply isn't there. 76 stays for a week, just sleeping and nursing himself through the aches and pains of old age and a concussion grenade.

He learns that staying alone is untenable. There’s enough sky above to bring back old memories. He catches himself thinking about Jack Morrison’s father, singing along to old vinyls with his son. There’s worth in the memories; the songs were warnings about the fair folk, written long ago and an ocean away, but they’re applicable everywhere. It’s the feelings that come along with it, the smell of an Indiana summer and the exact pattern of his father’s smile lines, those are the liability. The sound of Jamie Morrison’s laugh is a weight that slows him down. 

The second time he returns to the safehouse Reaper is already there, recovering from a brutal fight with Helix security; the Talon warehouse is burning in the distance, the stench of it just barely reaching them. They drink beer and say nothing. He jostles Reaper in the hall on his way to the john and Reaper makes a puzzled sound at the contact. Somehow, without a word on the topic spoken, they catch each other packing on the same day. He lets Reaper leave first, and then heads the opposite direction, eyes out in case he’s followed. 

The third time he returns to the safehouse there's mail in the mailbox. There shouldn’t be. No mail service runs here. He retrieves the envelope carefully, slits it with a knife, and finds a water-damaged, warped, ancient greeting card. There's a solid weight inside it.

He lays it on the ground and opens it from a distance with the blade of his knife. Nothing happens for a moment, and then the chip inside activates and a tinny melody warbles out.

The tune is only barely recognizable, and he flips the card shut and retreats to his transport without knowing why. The Star Spangled Banner plays in his head as he drives, back to anonymity and civilization.

_sing the Star Spangled Banner_

_Uncle Sam and sing the Star Spangled Banner_

_You'd dress like Uncle Sam and sing the Star Spangled Banner_

_You'd dress like Uncle Sam and sing the Star Spangled Banner if the UN asked you to, wouldn't you, Morrison?_

_if the UN asked you to_

_asked you_

Pixelated overcompressed video and audio from the life of a dead man. Gabriel Reyes’ voice deep and swollen like a ripe fruit with frustration and despair at Jack Morrison’s refusal to listen. 

Only the two of them have that memory. Not even Athena knows it; they’d been overseas and they’d had their comms off. 

Talon asked the right question and Reaper told them about the safehouse. But they didn't ask all the right questions, it seems. Reaper still has a part of himself out of their hands-- even if it's only memories. 

He warned 76 off, and 76 isn’t entirely sure why. 

But he’s sure that the warning is a favor he owes, now. 

* * *

They meet again outside of Paris, in Gerard’s summer villa. It’s a morbid, beautiful place to come, and 76 chooses not to feel anything about the colleague lost and the woman dismantled. Reaper doesn’t acknowledge it, either.  They watch the sunset, they drink shit wine. They say nothing to each other.

One night, Reaper turns on some of Gabriel's favorite shitty old aughts-rock and then approaches him slowly. 

76 watches him warily, and Reaper confuses him by digging a clawed hand into his shoulder, dragging him off the chaise, muscling him up-- it takes a few seconds to realize that it’s not to brawl, but to dance. 

Their unpracticed formal-dinner box step doesn't match the wailing guitar and yowling singer. Their hands don't wander, you could run a paperback book through the space they leave between their bodies-- _room for Jesus_ , the Baptists up the road from the Morrison farm would call it -- but it's not unpleasant. There’s an inertia to the movement, like it’s just slightly easier to continue than to stop. They don't stop as the track clicks over, or the next. It's not until the music dies that they let go of each other and go back to the wine.

Winston contacts him not long after Reaper vanishes again; he wants to know if it would be possible to secure the old villa, if 76 could check it while he’s in the vicinity. 

76 says yes.

Winston asks him if there are any signs that Talon knows about its existence.

76 reminds him that Reaper knows all of the Overwatch and Blackwatch properties.

"And are there signs that Reaper has been keeping an eye on this property in particular?" Winston asks patiently. That’s a direct enough question that 76 won’t obfuscate any further. His time with Reaper means nothing. The mission is everything. 

"I've got no doubt he's been at this location recently. He may come back."

"Then we'll be ready for him. I've got something cooking that should put a damper on his shadow-step."

76 grunts, and cuts the call. He has to run an errand in the city, has to repay a favor. He may be short on sentimentality, but there are rules about debts. 

* * *

Reaper is creeping toward the Paris villa when he sees it glinting from a crack between paving stones, bent and discarded. It’s a little engraved tag, the kind you put on pet collars.

It's decked in cheap pink rhinestones. It says _Killer._

He wraiths away, reforms with his back to a wall and a better vantage point, and sees then the new, discreet camera panning to the place where he was just standing, and then slowly back to catch the whole front approach to the house.

_And we'll retire somewhere nice, get a cat-_

_One of those ones with the flat faces like it ran into a shovel, and you'll spoil it stupid-_

_When this is all over, Morrison, I promise, we'll retire_

_That's right, with a picket fence and our cat Mittens_

_Her name is Killer, how dare you_

_Of course it is, of course, Reyes, you edgy fuck-_ Morrison's voice fond and bubbling with laughter, another old memory faded and threadbare because he cannot feel the way he once felt. He can't feel at all.

The void in Reaper's chest clenches and aches, the way that the socket of a pulled tooth aches.

The memory is useless now. They can't repeat signals, they can't leave a pattern. They can only take the shreds of their old life apart and light them like road flares, warning each other away.

He's seen the hollowness in 76's eyes. Whatever the other man has become, he's as heartless as the Reaper is Heartless. If the mission calls for it, he'll take on Reaper without hesitation. And if Talon commands, Reaper will end him. This is the upper limit of their consideration for each other, and that’s all right. They understand each other. 

Maybe it's a mercy killing, burning these pieces of the past. Maybe when there's nothing left of Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes those two old soldiers will finally be at peace.

* * *

They keep finding each other like magnets in a tumble-dryer-- they slide into each other’s space in five countries on three continents. Unsurprising, maybe, with Overwatch dogging Talon’s heels, but wherever they go the two of them choose the same boltholes and the same dives. When one organization or another compromises their meeting places, they warn each other, messages two or three or four times removed from any semblance of meaning. Any acknowledgement of their former lives comes to mean danger. 

They burn the memory of Gabriel’s rebuilt car, the old rustbucket he was so proud of; they sacrifice the name of Jack’s childhood dog; they give up their favorite restaurants one by one, and their fights, and their promises in the dark, each memory just a bargaining chip that loses its worth once it’s laid on the table. 

They try to kill each other, casually. Only as much as they need to. Not as much as they could. 

* * *

“Sometimes Talon tells me ‘do not fail’” Reaper notes, talking to nobody in a bar in Lijiang. His face is shrouded under a cloth mask, his eyes obscured by a hood. He looks straight forward when he speaks, as if he doesn’t see the Soldier beside him, but his voice is so low there’s no-one else the words could be for. 

76 watches him fiddle with the label on his beer bottle for few seconds, wordlessly holds out his hand for it, cracks the metal cap off, passes it back. 

“Sometimes they just give me the objective with no reinforcement. Haven’t noticed a pattern,,” Reaper goes on, lifting the bottom of his mask with the lip of the bottle, hiding his face with brown glass while he drinks. He swallows noiselessly. Maybe the liquid just evaporates in his throat, torn down for molecular parts; 76 has never asked what it feels like. 

“Don't know if it's a long term experiment of-” Reaper’s voice fries out to static on a word he literally can't say - “of Hers-- on my compliance-- or if it's just shitty non-standardized pre-mission protocol. If they just forget, half the time.”

“Shame they haven't had you organize the protocols. Unless they don't like 30 point checks for every little thing. For some reason.”

“25 points, and mission prep wasn’t ‘every little thing’. Those checks saved lives,” Reaper says, formulaically. There’s no fire to ignite this old argument, but again it's somehow easier to have it than not to have it. The routine brings them a measure of peace, the calm that Mercy so approves of. Imagining how she’d react if she knew exactly what was easing 76’s mind almost brings a smile to his face. 

Almost. 

They leave cash for their drinks, and one the coins in Reaper’s pile of change is off-color. 

76 palms it and heads outside, recognizes it at a glance when he examines it under the streetlights. 

It's a token for a little arcade in LA, a grimy, dark corner space where Gabriel Reyes and Jack Morrison spent an afternoon therapeutically murdering each other in every fighting game in the joint, except for the ones with robots. That was back in the hard days, just before Zurich, when they couldn’t have a conversation without shouting, when Genji had vanished to Nepal and McCree had just vanished.

The two old veterans had played hooky for three blissful hours, mashed buttons and laughed like idiots at the cartoon violence, giddy in this little patch of peace. They’d been straining to the breaking point over weeks of conflict and insane workloads and meeting after meeting with the UN to slow the hammer they could both see falling on their life’s work.  When their afternoon of escape  was over, before they could bring themselves to go back, they’d collapsed into each other’s arms in the alley nearby, panting raggedly into each other’s ears with the relief of just touching one another. 

Jack and Gabriel kept their leftover tokens, a reminder of life without the war, the future they were working themselves to the bone for. 

Reaper turns the memory into a warning. 76 receives the warning, and flips the token into a gutter. It’s useless to him now. 

Regret begins to seep up the cracks inside him, threatening to mildew. He chooses to ignore it. He chooses the mission. 

Mercy looks at his body language and his vitals when he returns from China and asks him, all sympathy and concern, if something happened. He doesn’t answer. 

* * *

Sombra doesn’t like to ask questions until she knows the answers already, so it takes longer for her to confront Reaper. It’s months before she can gather the evidence. She barely even has proof now; Gabriel Reyes was very, very good at his work. 

A familiar voice barks the door to her lab open and she spins in her chair to watch the Reaper come in impatiently.  He bulldozes his way in, shoulder first so that he doesn’t have to wait for the door to open full width. His leather coat shuffs across the metal edges, snaps against itself, only going to smoke at the very bottom. 

It’s happened again. 

“Hey, Gabe,” she coos. “You want to play I Spy?”

The mask turns to her, a cold stare her only response, but she knows she can draw him out. She's seen the patterns. She smirks, secure enough to tap into the place where her heart lives so that she can savor a little smugness. 

She splays her hands open, a holographic collage spilling out between them-- random pieces of trash photographed on a rainy street. He must recognize King’s Row-- Talon was fighting it out with Overwatch there only a few hours ago. 

“This game is called ‘which one’s important?’”  She flicks through the images; bottle cap, other bottle cap, ragged sneaker hanging by its laces, takeout menu, bottle cap, fast food wrapper, other takeout menu, flick flick flick, trash trash trash. 

Reaper growls and waves a hand through the display, hard light splintering into ripples around his gauntlet.

“I don't have the time for this.”

“Yeah, I know. Your big mission. It was going pretty bad until you got distracted by something shiny.”  She stabilizes the display, starts the parade of trash over. Quickly, she flicks through every object her cameras could capture on the street where Reaper had suddenly paused, stared down at nothing, changed course, and walked away from an Overwatch ambush. 

“What did you see? It saved you a lot of trouble, amigo. That box the monkey came up with is a mean piece of technology. You wouldn't have liked it if it hit you.”

“Sombra,” he rumbles, threatening. “You're reading too much into this. I’d stop, if I were you.”

“What did you see? And what did you see in Paris? In Dorado? What did you leave in that mailbox in Hong Kong?”

“It’s not my job to play games with you,” he grunts. 

She waits until he’s moved past her, settled in to review mission footage like the perfectionist fiend he is, and then drops her bomb. 

“You’re lucky I scramble the camera timestamps, Gabe, or even She was gonna notice eventually.” 

His shoulders stiffen. 

“Notice.” An inflectionless snarl, but still undeniably a question. 

She’s got him now, trolling him along with a trail of breadcrumbs, and she loves it. 

“How you come back from your mystery dates more solid. How you talk more. Think faster.” An unexpected spike of jealousy sours her triumph, and she cuts her connection to her heart quickly. “I want a piece of whatever you got.” 

Reaper whirls on her, crossing the distance between them in a flurry of smoke, and she knows she would have found his reaction hilarious if she were capable.

“Show me the footage you're talking about,” he demands, a claw leveled at her throat. 

“What’s the magic word?”

“What do you want?”

“A ‘por favor’ would be nice. And I need you to run an errand for me. Just drop off a package.”

“Nothing alive or radioactive.”

She waves a hand at him. It isn't. It's just a little phishing expedition, a generic thumb drive that needs to get through some locked doors. She knows how much her information is worth and she’d never overcharge such a reliable customer. 

“Not going to give me a please?” She dispels her large screen and its collage of garbage. “Fine. All right, look.”

Now she opens both hands, palms up, with parallel video windows beaming up from each. 

One window shows Reaper walking through the Talon base, shedding smoke, fingertip dissolving as he tries to key a door and has to resort to voice activation. Another camera angle, another hallway, Reaper stepping out of eyeshot of a group of soldiers as his whole shape blurs and vibrates, as his body bends as if he’s in pain. 

The other window shows Reaper opening a series of doors without a second thought, shoving aside an unwary Talon scientist loitering in his way, grabbing a soldier by the collar to lecture him about some bullshit or another, Sombra doesn't have the audio. 

“Before,” she says, lifting her right hand and highlighting the first video. “After.” She locks the second video in a quick loop of grabbing the soldier, grabbing the soldier, grabbing the soldier. “Before,” a flickery montage of Reaper defeated by common doors. “After.” Push the scientist, push the scientist, push the scientist. 

Reaper leans in just a few millimeters, riveted to the displays. 

“You didn't know,” she realizes. 

And she's disappointed. There's something out there that makes Reaper more himself, something that eases the ache they both feel. She wants it, and he doesn’t even know he has it. 

But he didn't know. He doesn't know. If she can find the key, somebody’s going to pay through the nose for that.  That kind of opportunity isn’t disappointing at all. 

* * *

76 is starting to suspect that Mercy is right; something does happen to him during his run-ins with the Reaper. He feels significantly less positive about its effects than the good doctor, though.

Seeing Ga—seeing the Reaper—shakes bits of his past loose, even without the necessity to comb through them for signs and portents that only the two of them will be able to interpret. Spending time at Watchpoint: Gibraltar complicates things further—he knows these halls and they’re full of ghosts and Jack Morrison’s old comrades in arms. He needs to be here, though; he’s reached the end of what one man can do against Talon. He and Overwatch share a common goal, and he won’t run away from it.

He’ll have to exorcise these memories and move on with the mission.  

After another tangle with Talon—and a bullet in the shoulder from the ghost of Amelie LaCroix, and a couple cracked ribs and deep scratches courtesy of Reaper—he finds himself at the watchpoint at loose ends, hiding in his temporary quarters while he recuperates to Mercy’s  standards. He can’t focus on the documents he was trying to read, and his mind keeps drifting dangerously.

He finds he has an old song rattling around his head and refuses to think about why; that turns out to be a mistake. Going off the principle that the easiest way to shake an earworm is to listen to the whole song, he asks Athena to play it.

His skin is already crawling at the static of the low-fi conversion that sounds too much like a record popping; two words in the singer’s broad, strong voice is enough to remind him. _All Around My Hat_ is Jamie Morrison’s favorite song. Jamie Morrison is alive, and thinks his son is dead, is unaware of the empty half-man that lives in his boy’s body now. If he knew he would put his arms out and call him home, and the aching horrible _want_ to go home crushes him down.

He slams a fist into the wall, feeling stitches pull all up his arm. “Cut the track!”

The music stops.

“As has been the case since my activation, I do not require haptic reinforcement to verbal input,” Athena says. 

“What?”

“Punching the wall is not an effective means of interface,” she says coolly.

He takes in a breath.

He lets it out.

He thinks the AI has said her fill, but a few moments later she speaks again.

“Historical data suggests that the most likely response at this juncture is ‘Go to hell, Athena.’”

He takes another breath, centering himself.

“I am” a pause so long the speakers depower with a click before reconnecting. “Becoming concerned about your mental health.”

Another long pause.

“The expected response here was ‘none of your damn business’, with a 30% likelihood of adding ‘you damn computer’ or more colorful idiom for artificial intelligence.”

The speaker clicks off again. He doesn’t relax. She’s too thorough to start this discussion and not finish it. There, the soft hiss of a connection, before she says-

“Commander Morrison-“

“That’s an inactive designation,” he says flatly.

“Based on incomplete information. It is my advice--” she cuts herself off, her voice tripping over itself as one subprocess pre-empts another. “-Winston would like to see you in the lab.”

“Acknowledge. On my way.”

“Acknowledged.” She doesn’t go so far as to replicate a sigh, but the tone suggests it.

He only realizes that it’s an ambush when he arrives and Mercy is there, next to Winston. The gorilla has never learned to conceal his nerves, and his voice is too obviously jovial when he greets 76. 

“How are you holding up? Angela tells me you got some nasty scratches on the last mission.”

“Nothing incapacitating.”

Winston clears his throat. “I… want to ask you about the last mission. Specifically, your encounter with Reaper.”

The wraith had appeared behind him, casting a shadow that gave 76 just enough time to take cover and escape a shotgun blast to the head; he’d dropped a wall on Reaper with a well-aimed rocket and then charged him as he re-formed out of the rubble.

“Closing the distance was the quickest way to take his shotguns out of play.”

“You use that tactic… frequently with him. That’s in part what I wanted to talk about.”

76 nods, unnecessarily. It had been obvious enough.

Mercy leans forward a little. “When you engage physically with the Reaper—have you seen any signs, at all, that he remains in close proximity voluntarily, or involuntarily?”

“The obvious move would be to ghost out of your grasp and reform at shotgun range,” Winston clarifies. “It’s not like him to ignore an advantage. If this has something to do with your history together-”

“It doesn’t.” Curt. A complete shutdown. “If you can get hand to hand with Reaper, he can’t shadow-step while he’s in contact. I’ve seen him try.”

Mercy and Winston share a look with each other, and the silence that follows is somehow more accusatory than Athena’s earlier lecture.

Winston pulls his legs up, twining his toes, mirrors the motion with his hands; a nervous habit he only resorts to when he has to give bad news.

Mercy takes pity on him. “That’s not the case. Not for anyone on this team who has engaged him. Not for anyone but you.”

“Bull.”

“I’ve felt him dissolve in my grip,” Winston says, eyes shadowing. He glances around the lab, probably remembering his first tangle with the Reaper. “And the rest of the team can corroborate me. I’ve reviewed footage as well as reports.”

“And I’ve felt him try and fail to move. Whatever you think, he’s not acting out some kind of sentiment,” 76 says. “Or according to some back-alley agreement. I’m not going to sit here and defend myself against—”

“We are not accusing you of anything,” Mercy soothes.

“Sure feels like it.”

“We are not the UN,” she says, going to her feet, her instinct to heal and pacify pulling her toward him. She reaches for his unwounded arm. “We are not accusing you, Jack.“

“That’s not my designation, _Doctor_.” It’s meant to be a statement of fact, but it comes out an angry growl, and her hand flinches away.

Winston untangles toes and fingers, shifting into a more mobile position, poised to move between them. His nostrils flare slightly, and 76 takes a step back and forces his tight shoulders down, falls into a bastardized parade rest with his hands safely linked behind him.

“At any rate,” Mercy says, slowly, awaiting another outburst. “You are done? Good. We have developed a theory.”

He nods silently.

Another exchanged glance between Mercy and Winston.

“You are aware of the concept of sympathetic magic, or?”

“Things that look like other things are connected. Like dolls.”

“Yes… but there is more than that. Things that are similar are connected, not just if they look like one another. The connection may be one of origin or blood also. A curseworker can target a family member of their target, for example.”

“Does this have a point?”

“You and—” she stops, and glares at him. “’Jack Morrison’ and Gabriel Reyes shared a connection of blood, of pact, of origin.” She holds up her hand as he goes to correct her. “Not in your births, I know, but in your rebirth. There are a scarce handful of SEP survivors, none who were ever as close as you. You took the same injections, faced the same risk of death, trained shoulder by shoulder for years. You are bound.

“I believe you—bring out the aspects of Gabriel Reyes in the Reaper. Any that remain. And one aspect of Gabriel Reyes, also, was that he did not dissolve at will.”

76 wants to disagree, but it makes… entirely too much sense. The skitter and scratch of his past every time he’s near the mercenary; the way his instincts betray him, when his body reacts as if his lover and not his enemy is close. It could be entirely psychological, but then again, so much magic is. And if it’s true. If it’s true that nobody else can keep a hand on the wraith, then there’s something to this. No matter how much he’d prefer there wasn’t.

“Interesting theory,” he admits. “But not much of a tactical advantage. I can’t punch the Reaper to death.”

Winston lets out a breath that isn’t quite a laugh.

Mercy’s face shadows. Now she’s the harbinger of bad news, it seems.

“Reaper cannot be harmed by any normal means, we know. He has, I suspect, undergone the rite of Koschei.”

76 doesn’t confirm it. She doesn’t need it confirmed. She doesn’t need to know what he was told in Wyoming. It wouldn’t change anything.

“We cannot access his heart,” she says. He finally catches the point—he’s been getting old and stupid, he berates himself. He should have understood what this was about from word one.

“You can access mine.”

“I think-- I think there is a way to use a piece of your heart—a microscopic amount of tissue, a minimally invasive surgery-“

“Do it.”

“I am not yet sure we can shield you from the curse,” she says, as if this is a problem. “The risk to you-“

“Reaper’s more a liability to you than I am an advantage,” he says. “The risk to me shouldn’t factor in.”

“Of course it factors in,” Winston interjects, horrified. “None of us want you to die.”

“That’s an issue you’ll have to resolve among yourselves, then.” 

Mercy gapes. He's hurt her feelings through this whole ordeal, but it’s this that seems to be the last straw. He turns on his heel. He’s made his point clear. 

Mercy tells him the next day that she’s begun her research, and then doesn’t speak to him again for the remainder of the summer.

* * *

In late autumn, Shimada Hanzo and Jesse McCree walk into the morning briefing together holding hands, two men with a shared secret.

76 looks at McCree’s face, and suspects. He thinks he knows.

“Brother, what is this-?” Shimada Genji, half teasing, half worried.

“Ain’t ever seen two fellas hold hands before?” McCree says, his voice resonating with something that’s been absent in him for almost a decade now. There are people around the briefing table who boggle, the ones who didn’t know him before, the ones who have never heard what Jesse McCree sounds like when he’s happy.

And then he grins at them all helplessly and tugs Hanzo closer to him, the archer wearing an answering smile at the manhandling.

“Jesse?” Mercy breathes. “How has this happened?”

“I don’t rightly know, ma’am, but, uh—” McCree blushes, looks to Hanzo for help or permission. “But there was, uh—”

“There was a kiss involved,” Hanzo says frankly, but the tips of his ears go pink.

Genji lets out a whoop and bolts over the table, still somehow getting to McCree a millisecond after Ana does. The cyborg engulfs all three of them—archer, cowboy, sniper caught in the crossfire—in an embrace.

The room erupts into noise, those few who knew the truth of Jesse’s condition cheering, the many who didn’t looking around wildly and demanding explanations.

76 leaves, when it becomes apparent no actual briefing will be happening. He takes himself to the practice range.

True love is as unreliable as it is powerful. Jesse had better odds of bleeding to death via papercut from a winning lottery ticket than he had of a simple kiss reversing the rite of Koschei.

76 refuses to apply the morning’s events to the only other subject of the rite that he knows of. He chooses not to think about it.

Until, mid-training scenario, he cannot stop the thought that even if Gabriel Reyes could be rescued from Talon’s control by love, the only man who ever stood a snowball’s chance in hell of doing it has been systematically destroying his ability to love for six and a half years.

He freezes at an inopportune moment and takes a stun-level blast from one of the training robots full in the chest.

As the scenario ends at his ‘death’ and he goes to his knees with force of the blast, he thinks he feels something inside of him crack in half.

* * *

 

Not long after the solar New Year, Mercy speaks to him again—professionally, distantly requesting he choose a date for heart surgery. 

After it’s done-- after she’s taken a fiber of muscle out of him and armed the weapon that can kill a Reaper, she tries one more time. 

“I know you loved him, once,” she says. “Are you sure. Are you _sure_ about this. There may be another way--”

“It doesn’t matter now. Let’s get the job done, Doctor.”


	2. Saving a Heartless Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Vishkar is back on their bullshit, 76 is beginning to realize that complete emotional suppression is not a healthy coping mechanism, Winston is a good commander, Ana puts up with so much, and Reaper has a very weird day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: PTSD because old soldiers, mental health issues (anhedonia, general inability to access emotions), and body horror. The body horror comes in both 'this is a Tam Lin retelling, somebody's going to turn into some shit' and 'Reaper's face has forgotten how to face' flavors. 
> 
> ~~I'm posting half-betaed, so any grammatical bullshit you see is not due to Fakkin_Drongo's negligence, it's due to my jumping the gun.~~ Last of the grammatical tweaks in, fully beta'd version ahoy.

Winter starts to give way to spring, and the Watchpoint begins to fill with the agents that had scattered over the holiday season. 76 welcomes it; the noise is abrasive but better than silence. He’s stayed in Gibraltar except for small surgical raids on defunct Overwatch bases to gather data. He hasn’t risked going to any of the old haunts where he might run across the Reaper.

Reinhardt and Torbjorn are the last to return to the Watchpoint, and when they do, Mercy calls a private meeting of the veterans of Overwatch.  And Blackwatch; McCree and Genji file in, looking uneasy when Winston seals the door behind them.

“Haveta say, Doc, I don’t love that we’re having some kind of hush-hush meeting.  This is a big part of what brought Overwatch to its knees the last time. Ain’t it.” He directs that at 76.  It’s only a confirmation of what 76 suspected—Jesse knows.

“If you all decide to tell the rest of the team about this meeting, once you’ve heard the whole story, I won’t stop you,” Winston assures him. “But given the sensitivity of the subject, I wanted you all to have the choice.”

“It’s about the Reaper,” Genji murmurs. McCree jerks his head in a nod.

“It is,” Mercy says, from her seat at the head of the table. “I believe we have found a way to kill him.”

She explains, briefly, the principles of sympathetic magic. The lecture is unnecessary for 76 – who’s heard it – and for Torbjorn. The engineer knows far more than he wants to about the subject. The sympathetic magic of shape played a role in early omnic development. He interjects once or twice, actually, correcting some small facet here and there. The rest of the team listens patiently.

“I’d say you’ve found your connection to that old ghost, is that what you’re going fer?” Torbjorn rumbles, when he feels it’s gone on too long.

“Show them,” Mercy says quietly.

“Acknowledged,” says Athena, and the big display screen lights up.

76 forgets how to breathe, briefly. It’s one of the old press photos, cropped down to Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes. The two men stand back to back, Jack in his blue strike commander’s uniform, Gabriel in a dark jacket and special-forces beret, the first and most publicly acceptable face of the Blackwatch program.

This one was taken early on, during the founding of Overwatch. 76 would know it even if he didn’t remember the shoot. There’s still hope in the two men’s eyes. Both of them still believe in the project. Jack Morrison’s face hasn’t begun to go blank; there’s pride and not banked rage in Gabriel Reyes’ eyes. He’s a calm presence at his partner’s back.

They both look so young.

76 tears his eyes away from Reyes’ picture, and finds the rest of the table looking at him.

“Were there actually any of you who didn’t know?” he asks, taking off his mask and visor, ignoring the questions on every face.

“I was not sure,” Reinhardt admits, as quietly as he’s capable. “I am sure you had your reasons. Does this mean, that the Reaper-?”

“Yup,” McCree says, and then makes a small sound that draws the table’s attention to him.

Genji puts a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We have known for… some months. Both that Talon was founded by many of those we once called comrades in arms, and that the Reaper is Gabriel Reyes. Their tactics—and his—are recognizable to those who knew him well.”

He murmurs something for McCree’s ears only, and McCree shakes his head, tugging his hat down to cover the tears in his eyes.  Fareeha stands and drags her chair over to sit by McCree on the opposite side from Genji, gripping his shoulder.

“Sorry, y’all. Sorry. I knew, I just haven’t really thought about it since before. I. Uh.”

Since before he could feel the pain.

“You are … asking us to kill Gabriel Reyes,” Reinhardt says, his voice dulled down to normal conversational levels. “He lives and you would kill him.”

“It is not living, Reinhardt,” Ana says, shaking her head. “I have seen under the mask. I know what Talon has made of him.”

“They have his heart,” 76 says, when Reinhardt still looks ready to argue. “He’d be better off dead.”

Mercy’s eyes lance into him. He lifts his eyebrows, asks her a silent question. Yes, he knew. Does she intend to do anything about it?

No; she just feels betrayed. Irrelevant.

That last piece of news has brought the mood down.

“This is the only way, then,” Torbjorn sighs. “He’s invulnerable save for his heart, and if Talon’s got it locked up, the only way to get at that is from a distance.”

“Could we not rescue it?” Reinhardt asks, Fareeha instantly agreeing.

“And do what with it?” 76 says. “McCree, you looked for a cure for years. Even if we had his heart, could we make him whole again?”

“…not any normal way. Not that I know of,” McCree says reluctantly. “…we’d either haveta give it to him and let him be a free-range sociopath, or keep it on lockdown ourselves.”

“Not an option,” Winston rumbles. “We’re not in the business of slavery.”

“Suppose that’s that, then,” Torbjorn mutters. “And what about you, ’76?’ It’s your heart as well.”

“I think I’ve found a way to protect him from the effects of the curse,” Mercy says. “I can localize it to a very small area. If Reaper is in that area and 76 isn’t…”

“Risky,” Ana says. “How big are the spell components?”

“Small enough to fit in an ampule. And volatile enough to react as soon as it touches the blood of either of them,” Mercy says, utterly miserable. She’s never come around to the idea that sometimes death is the only solution to a problem.

“’Do no harm’ taking a beating, Doctor?” 76 asks.

“Shut up, Jack,” Ana says, in a tone so familiar that the name doesn’t even trigger a flare of irritation. 76 settles back into his chair, replacing his mask and visor.

“We have only one chance, I assume?” Ana goes on.

“I can make another if the first fails, but if we fail—”

“Gabriel will ward himself. Talon will make him do so, even if he would prefer otherwise.”

“You think he wants to die?” Tracer asks, the first words she’s uttered all meeting. Her voice is small.

“Jack is ready enough to,” Ana says mildly. “And Gabriel has as much of a reason to, if not more.”

Tracer’s gaze jerks to him again and 76 recalls that she’d been fond enough of Morrison, once.  There’s raw grief in her expression, and he looks up at the head of the table, away from her.

“So,” Winston says, uncertain. “Now you all know about the weapon, and its history. If you want to bring the rest of the team in—or not—this is the time to say something.”

“I ain’t keeping this from Hanzo,” McCree says instantly.

“Nor I,” Genji says. “And my master would let me keep the secret, but I will not betray him in this way.”

“They have pledged their lives to our cause,” Reinhardt says. “All of them deserve to know.”

“I am with Reinhardt,” Ana says.

“I’m with Reinhardt and mom.”

“I don’t care.”

Everyone looks at Tracer. Tears are streaming down her cheeks.

“Do what you like, luvs. I’m off for a bit of a fly. Just you make sure you leave me out of it, when the time comes,” she says to Winston, and then she’s gone, a blur that pauses only to unseal the door and then vanishes.

“Now, hon, you come back—Genji, yer a fast bastard, go catch her before she goes off on her lonesome. She shouldn’t be alone.”

“Already gone,” the cyborg says, and vanishes nearly as quickly.

“You certainly haven’t lost your way with the youth, have you?” Ana muses. Somehow it takes the edge off the rising tension, the sense of an impending argument 76 remembers only too well from the final days of the old Overwatch.  Reinhardt nearly cracks a smile; Mercy lifts one corner of her mouth and looks like the effort hurts.

Winston looks gratefully at Ana, and then turns his gaze on 76. His innate deference and hesitation are missing; he’s got the air of a commander when he addresses 76.

“I think you should make yourself scarce for a while. Find one of the non-critical field assignments and work it until such time as you remember how to keep your issues from affecting your teammates.”

That’s a good call. 76 knows he’s been sowing discord, letting his discontent poison everyone else’s moods; Winston’s solution is elegant. There’s a flash of pride in Overwatch’s new CO. He strangles it, not quite quickly enough to stop himself from giving Winston an approving nod.

He salutes before he turns away, straight and regulation-perfect. He walks out to find a field assignment that will get him out from under the team’s feet without putting him in the path of Reaper.

He doesn’t allow himself to dwell on why that’s now an essential criterion.  He doesn’t want to admit to himself that if he has to confront the other man, knowing that the kill order is set, that it might break him.

The image of Gabriel in the old photo, face warm and stance confident and body positioned literally to have Jack’s back, refuses to fade. All these old quarters look too much alike, too much like the ones they shared—hard to avoid the memories that are already starting to crowd around him as he starts to pack.

Steam on the mirror, shower shutting off, almost-silent feet, Gabriel with a white towel around his hips, smiling.  Gabriel in and out at an ungodly hour of the morning, stealing a kiss between a meeting and a mission. Gabriel tired, Gabriel arguing with him over ration-bar breakfasts, Gabriel tense against him on the couch and a shitty TV show on to fill the silence because if they say anything to each other there will be another fight but if they spend another night apart it might kill them.

Other memories steal in on their heels; he remembers how this place was when they were a team. He remembers Tracer’s panic during the King’s Row hostage crisis, remembers before that when Ana’s hair was still dark all the way through, when McCree was unimaginably young and Genji was still a ball of rage and both of them drove Gabriel to insanity on a weekly basis.

Even if he didn’t have his marching orders, he couldn’t stand another day here.

There was no indication of foul play in the equipment failures at Ecopoint: Antarctica in Agent Zhou’s report, but it’s in the protocol to send someone to check anyway. 76 decides he’ll follow up on that, and packs warm.

 

* * *

 

  
  


76 spends the first week in Antarctica doing basic repairs with the equipment Winston and Agent Zhou sent along on the Orca. The solar collectors are in shambles; he goes through most of a backup battery before those are back online. Then, when the old on-site batteries don’t start to charge, he has to troubleshoot, re-wiring and then testing each battery until he’s weeded out almost a dozen that just won’t charge and then shuffling the working ones into the working charging banks.

It’s enough like working on the Morrison farm that it soothes him, the vast expanse of the snowfields not completely unfamiliar after winters on the prairie. It’s not so familiar it’s dangerous, though; there’s something alien and clean about the blown snow under 24-hour sunlight.

The bodies of Agent Zhou’s teammates were retrieved a year ago and returned to their families  for burial, but some of their effects are still scattered through the base. He collects and boxes those. It doesn’t feel like enough. These scientists were Overwatch, and they were abandoned, never given their honors. He pulls up the personnel roster.

Carving the names of the fallen into the concrete wall of the cryo chamber takes another four days-- one pass with a hammer and chisel, another pass to sharpen the lines and clean up the detail with a sonic dremel, a last go with sealant and sandpaper to keep the new marks from weathering. It may be an overstep; belatedly, he sends a text message to Overwatch HQ, to agent Zhou, attaches a picture of the wall.

_[I can repair this if it’s inappropriate]_

When he gets the response it’s only 6:30 in Gibraltar.

_[Don’t repair that please! It is very good. Thank you. Thank you.]_

The names keep him company as he begins the tedious work of troubleshooting the failed chambers. They’re polite, quiet ghosts; Jack Morrison barely knew any of them, though he’d signed off on paperwork for most of them.

Working himself to the limit of his endurance every day makes his sleep deep and dreamless. He didn’t realize how much anger he was carrying with him until it drains away under the monotony of repetition and busywork. He doesn’t forget his mission to hunt down those who caused the fall of Overwatch, but he does find that for a little while he can let it rest.

By the end of the second week he can officially confirm that nothing except the extreme conditions nine years ago caused the equipment failure that killed all but one of the Ecopoint’s crew. The resolution is useless, but faintly satisfying.

He doesn’t need to look long for something else to occupy him; Ecopoint: Antarctica isn’t a small facility. It has an old safety and maintenance manual about as thick as an old print phonebook, full of checks that should have been run monthly or yearly and hadn’t been. It was a benign neglect; the scientists had known which were critical and which didn’t need to be kept to the letter.

76 decides to follow the manual to the letter; it’ll keep him in busy work as long as he needs.

He’s not past the first section-- “HVAC Filter Inspection and Maintenance”--  when he gets the call. He drops what he’s doing to answer it. Nobody from Overwatch is calling him because they miss him. Something’s happened.

Winston’s face fills the main screen of the Ecopoint. He frowns at 76.

“Status, soldier?”

“Functional.” 76 gives a quick nod. He’s got a handle on himself now, can shut down any inappropriate outbursts before they hurt team morale.

“Good, because we’ve gotten a lead on the incident you reported in Wyoming last year. We’re going to need all hands on deck. Lena’s on her way to get you, estimated arrival in six hours.”  Winston sighs. “Try not to upset her.

“Understood.” It must be urgent; they’d put the fastest pilot on it, even though it was one he’d antagonized.

Winston huffs at him, satisfied, and cuts the feed.

  
  


He packs his own personal effects in an hour, eats an MRE, stores the rest neatly in case he comes back, and spends the last few hours continuing through “HVAC Filter Inspection and Maintenance.”

He can hear the supersonic whine of the thrusters as the jet descends. The benefits the SEP granted him were a hell of a grab bag; he needs glasses to read but he can still hear silent alarms and dog whistles as clearly as he could at twenty-five. He’s out the door and waiting in the blinding snowscape by the time Tracer touches down.

The landing thrusters blow the snow around him, kicking the world into a glittering snow globe. Tracer’s voice crackles through his comm, «All aboard! Next stop Gibraltar. In a hurry, if you don’t mind. It’s colder than a witch’s out there.»

“Thanks, agent.” He jogs forward through the whirling white, throws his duffel into the half-open doorway of the transport, and jumps up after it up so she can begin the ramp retracting immediately.

«...that’s a hurry, all right, but much appreciated. Ta, love.» She shuts the doors and the engines whine back to full power.

He pauses before taking a seat in the cramped little cabin, and knocks on the wall to the cockpit, next to the audio intake.

“Doing all right, agent?”

«Right as, commander.» An indrawn breath crackles over the interior speakers.

He’s almost ashamed of how much he needed the humbling of the work and the snow. There was no need for him to tear into Morrison’s old people for missing him.

“...honest mistake, agent.”

She breathes out. «Well. Glad to see you’ve not taken up permanent residence up your own arse, si-- Soldier.»

He almost smiles under the mask. “I owe you an apology for our last meeting.”

«You do,» she agrees.

“I’m sorry.”

«Accepted. Woops, grab onto something-»

He tightens his grip on the safety strap just in time; they hit a patch of turbulent air and it shakes them hard for a few seconds before they level out. These little transports lack the little frills and luxuries of the Orca-- like consistent inertial dampening inside. He swings himself over to one of the seats and straps down.

«We’re above it now, should be clear flying the rest of the way,» Tracer reports. «...it was a nasty lurch, you know. I didn’t know it was you. Suppose the rest of them thought I’d figured it out as well, so nobody told me.  Thought you were dead all this time. Then there you are, alive again like a miracle, and it didn’t seem to matter at all to you.»

“I’m not the man you knew. Not anymore. Jack Morrison’s gone, and I’m just another soldier. It doesn’t matter, not like you think.”

«Sounds like rubbish to me, sss.»

“I won’t shout at you if you call me ‘sir.’ I’m not your superior, but I won’t ‘take up residence’ again.”

«Oh, good.» She’s audibly relieved. «All right; you’re talking rubbish, sir.»

“We’re going to have to disagree on that one.” He swings himself over to a seat and straps himself into the webbing. “Can you fill me in on the situation at the watchpoint?”

«All I know of it. I only had a chance to glance at the docs, and they’re still putting things together back at the ‘Point. Short story seems to be that Talon’s got a load of Vishkar weapons-- you knew that, of course, they managed to move most of ‘m out before someone sent Helix in. Vishkar’s playing the innocents about the whole thing, like they didn’t know who they were selling to.»

“They’d have had to be pretty damn careless not to.”

«Here’s the exciting twist: someone contacted us out of Vishkar, some lady who works for them. She says they know-- well, we figured that out-- and that someone inside the company got a hold of a Talon transmission with some of their targets in it. They let Talon wreck things a bit, step in heroic-like to chase Talon off, and then line their pockets off a juicy rebuilding contract.»

“Wouldn’t put it past them. Why the rush?”

«Well, one of Talon’s big targets is a community leader over in Rio. Don’t know if you’ve heard of her? Maria Justo de Aliveira? Left her order for politics after the mess with Vishkar, been organizing rebuilding by the local government and not by contractors. Oh, she’s lovely, she’s helping the government start talks with Cidadãos Omnicos do Brasil and I can’t think of anyone else who could do that without winding up with their head on a pike. Naturally she’s the sort Talon wants out of their hair before peace starts catching on. Lú’s beside himself about it all, he’s been working with her-» the agent rattles on, not without an edge of bitterness in her voice.  

“Tracer.”

«Sorry, sir. So, she’s one of the targets.»

He gathers his thoughts. He knows Talon; he knows them damn well. They have several modes of assassination, but when they’re working for their own purposes they act like the terrorists they are; they cause a splash.

“They like riots; there’ll be several hits around the city alongside surgical hit on her. And they like an audience; it’ll be where lots of people are watching, a groundbreaking ceremony, or a religious event, or a -- when’s Carnivale this year?”

«That’s why the rush! It’s the twenty-third.»

It’s Sunday the twenty-first.  They’ve got two days.

“Christ.”

«My thoughts exactly, sir. You sitting down now?»

“Yes.”

«Good, I’m going to push us just a little bit faster now. Mind the acceleration…»

  
  


They make it back in five gruelling hours. 76 is sore all over, doubts Tracer is feeling any better herself. At least he managed to grab a little sleep.

As he expected, Tracer comes out of the cockpit with a distinct wobble to her step, not immediately zipping away; she lists sideways and 76 catches her, offers her an arm.

McCree is waiting for them in the hangar, and he looks at Tracer leaning on the Soldier.

“You get your act together, then?”

...76 wonders if he knows how much he looks like his old mentor in this moment. The cowboy’s expression and body language are so reminiscent of Gabriel Reyes in full  you-know-what-you-did-and-I-don’t-even-have-to-say-it-do-I-soldier mode. He feels so tired. And old. And stupid.

He gives McCree a nod.

McCree’s face softens; he nods back, and hits the pushpad to let them into the base in a gentlemanly fashion.

“Don’t know how you shaved the time off, Lena, darlin’, but I’m glad you did. Lúcio just arrived back onsite from Numbani and he and our Vishkar contact are havin’ _words._ ”

They don’t have to go far to get confirmation of McCree’s warning-- the door to the conference room is open and the argument spilling out is loud and getting louder by the second.

“-for your help because someone is using Vishkar for their own gain, and I-”

“VISHKAR is using Vishkar for their own gain-!”

“This is not Vishkar! This is one misguided individual-”

“Sure! Your boss!”

“Someone acting irrationally, trying to re-establish our presence in Rio even when it would be illogical to do so-”

“Like, I don’t know, your boss?!”

They step into the room, their entrance too quiet to be heard over the rapid-fire bickering between agent Lúcio and the woman on the viewscreen.

Genji, Hanzo and Ana are the only ones who notice; Genji gives them a sarcastically cheerful little wave. Ana rolls her eyes. Hanzo gives Jesse a glance full of unspoken desperation -- _please rescue me from this._

“Mister Korpal would never do something this unethical-”

“I’m sorry, what started the fire in the Favelas?”

76 sees Winston inhale deeply, and grits his teeth for what’s about to come.

The Vishkar employee clasps her arms in front of her, one hand plucking at the sleeve of her uniform. “That was an accident. Vishkar would NEVER-”

“Are you brainwashed or just STUPID?”

“ENOUGH,” Winston roars, and it is literally a roar; not quite the bellow of a full-sized male gorilla, but halfway there. It stuns the room into silence.

The woman on the screen rocks back and claps her hands over her ears in surprise and Lúcio shrinks in place a little.

Winston’s de-escalation is a masterful use of body language-- he’s made himself huge, and now that he’s gotten control of the room back he makes himself smaller, chest deflating slowly, wide eyes lidding. He adjusts his glasses unnecessarily-- probably just to draw focus to them, to the most obviously ‘civilized’ part of his appearance, and then spreads his hands out on the table where they can be seen.

76 would have liked to use that move, back in a past life, just once or twice. Maybe on the UN.

“Apologies, Miss Vaswani,” Winston says calmly. “While understanding the motive behind this conspiracy and identifying the mastermind inside Vishkar are important, the most time-sensitive issue at hand is the Talon attack. We’ll return to this topic later. With. Cooler. Heads,” he says, directly to Lúcio, who sets his jaw and looks away.

“Will you be safe if we contact you again?”

“As long as it is on this channel, it will not be intercepted. If I am unable to respond I will set an automatic response.”

“Very good. We are going to have to talk privately about this, but I promise you, we will not move without informing you.”

“Yes,” she says, and cuts the feed abruptly.

“This feels wrong,” Fareeha says, in the ensuing silence. “Every mission is overstepping our jurisdiction, but this is a huge overreach, Winston. This woman is trying to clean up Vishkar’s mess without accepting any of the consequences. If she really thought they were innocent, she wouldn’t have come to a vigilante group.”

“Or she knows that many law enforcement organizations happily sacrifice truth on the altar of convenience,” Anya says. “And call me a cynic, my dear, but I myself doubt that Vishkar would see a fair investigation-- though for for perhaps the opposite reasons. They have deep pockets and too many friends.”

“There is that,” Winston says, nodding at Ana. “And we have our own agenda at play.”

“Reaper,” Hanzo says soberly; he doesn’t sound like he’s guessing. He shoots a sympathetic glance toward McCree. “At such a high profile attack, his presence is all but guaranteed. You see this as an opportunity to bring him down.”

“You’re not wrong,” Winston agrees.

There’s a murmur in the room, but not shock. In the weeks 76 was gone, everyone must have gotten the memo.

“I don’t like it. But you all know our reasons. If there’s any objection….” Winston’s brown eyes track to Tracer, Genji, McCree.

“No. I… regret that we must do this, but I agree that it is needful,” Genji admits. Ana nods.

“I still can’t do it,” Tracer says quietly. “I won’t lift a hand to stop anybody, but I can’t help it either.”

“Understood, Lena. You were never in consideration for this mission.”

“Thanks, big guy.”

McCree turns to 76. “What about you, old timer? You sure about this?”

“It’s all I can do for him now,” 76 says. His voice is suddenly hoarse with a strain he’s trying not to acknowledge. “It’s all any of us can do.”

“Ain’t that a bitch and a half,” McCree mutters. He reaches out to squeeze Tracer’s arm with his right hand, and then claps 76 roughly on the shoulder.

“...I always thought you had a stick up your ass, Morrison,” he says, voice low. “But we all knew you bent over backwards to keep Blackwatch off the radar and out of trouble. N’ Gabe trusted you like he trusted the sun to rise even when the pair of you were fightin’ like cats and dogs.” He clears his throat, but his voice is still rough when speaks again. “Guess I’m saying-- I’m awful sorry it’s come to this. It’s a goddamn shame, is what it is.”

“Too right,” Tracer agrees quietly. She looks exhausted, and not just by the marathon flight.

76 doesn’t trust himself to speak. He nods to the both of them, pulls away, leaving McCree to support Tracer. They let him go, and there’s a horrible understanding in their eyes as they turn away, giving him some privacy as he leaves.

* * *

Two days isn’t much time to get ready to prevent a terrorist attack, especially when the terrorists in question have had months to prepare. McCree and Genji are dropped on site immediately, both of them in new identities so that they can mix, mingle, and look for signs of Talon from the ground. The rest of the team follow on the Orca.

Lúcio has point, and he’s taken as big a team they can spare without risking the watchpoint.  Reinhardt and D.Va are there as crowd control, to handle infrastructural damage or large swarms of agents; Zenyatta will support, since Lúcio will be pulling double duty. Fareeha, despite her early objections, was hardly going to refuse the opportunity to hit Talon, and Winston is along ostensibly as their contact with Vaswani. Ostensibly. 76 thinks the usually-gentle scientist may just want to hit something.  

Then there’s 76 and Ana Amari, their own little single-objective strike team. They’ve identified the likely hit point, a beachfront amphitheater where the mayor of Rio and Maria Justo de Aliveira will be addressing the crowd. Reaper will be at the assassination; he and Widowmaker function like a bird dog and a hunter. Reaper charges the prey at close range, all teeth and terror; he’ll take the kill if he can, but his function is almost equally to cause panic and flush the target out of hiding and into Widowmaker’s sights.

Ana has been entrusted with Mercy’s cursed dart. 76 has been given a small cube, studded with electronics.

“A disruptor field, something that should put the Reaper’s abilities on the fritz. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but if you can get him in the field, it will contain him for at least twenty seconds,” Winston explains, showing him how to operate it.  

“More than enough for Ana. She’ll think I’m making her job too easy.”

“Oh…” the gorilla sighs. “I don’t think it’s going to be that.”

He turns it over and over in his hands for a long time after Winston has gone off to join a game of cards on the lower deck.

The fragile peace he found in Antarctica can’t stand up to knowing that Talon is moving again, to shatter the peace that Lúcio’s compatriots earned with blood and destabilize a population that was only just getting their feet under them. And that’s not even thinking about--

It has to be done. It’s the last kindness that anyone can give him.

They land in Rio, and there’s no time for second thoughts.

76 and Ana hit the ground running; they have a lot of preparation to do, less than forty-eight  hours to do it. The amphitheater is surrounded by tall buildings in the financial district; there are countless vantage points for Widowmaker to nest in, almost infinite distractions to give Reaper an approach route. They rule out and block off all that they can.

76 wishes they had the elder Shimada along; he has an assassin’s instinct, and one more pair of eyes would be a godsend. They had to leave him behind, though-- in the off chance that Talon finds out what they’re up to, how much of the team is centered in Rio, he’ll be needed in Gibraltar. 76 and Ana will make do.

On the last night before Carnivale, 76  steals a little rest in a traveller’s hostel near the strike point. The celebration is beginning outside, joyful music already drifting in through the barred windows.

Despite his exhaustion, he can’t sleep; there’s a storm in him, rage and sorrow and hate and guilt.  He closes his eyes, lets them take him.

Or… tries.

At the last moment, he shuts himself down. It’s not voluntary. He just can’t let the pain in,  anymore than he could kill himself by holding his breath. It’s reflexive to cut the pain off, the choice to be heartless no longer a choice at all. The emotions are still there, still an angry knot in his stomach, still tightening his chest and raising his heart rate, but he can’t. He can’t-

He can’t feel it. He can’t shed a tear for what’s going to happen tomorrow.

He can’t even mourn Gabriel.

The cold weight of that presses down on him until he finally manages to sleep.

 

* * *

 

The morning starts off with an emergency alert. It shakes 76 out of a nightmare. He was running through the halls of the Zurich HQ, looking for the bomb that he knew was about to go off, and his father was trying to tell him something desperately important, but he couldn’t stop to listen, had to running down looping halls and through rooms full of sand.

His father’s voice echoes pleadingly after he wakes up, but the words in the dream were  meaningless, snatches of old radio commercials, bits of songs, riddles. He stuffs a ration bar in his face and heads toward the rendezvous point.

They have one, and only one piece of good luck: Talon is full of Blackwatch veterans and trained spec-ops soldiers, but Vishkar… isn’t.

Their contact, Vaswani, excitedly reports that the weapons Talon has are dotted with microscopic tags; her Vishkar conspirator, whoever that is, is almost certainly tracking them. Suddenly they’re not looking for well trained terrorists-- they’re watching where Vishkar architechs and security agents are clustering, all innocence. That’s easier.

As for the bad luck...

«Rio police found a body washed up on the beach,» Winston says over the comm. «A murder victim. They were dumped offshore.»

«That's not uncommon,» Lúcio says, a little muted. The renewed threat to his city is wearing him down; even his relentless good energy is flagging.

«No, indeed,» Winston sighs. «Gun crime is, however, and short-range shotgun wounds even more so.»

«Infiltration, then,» Ana says decisively. «That is Reaper; he will want everyone terrified before he even shows his face. Vishkar will not have eyes on him; he only uses his own weapons. Widowmaker likewise, unfortunately.»

«It's certainly possible that he’s taken the victim’s place. But we can't assume that,» Winston cautions. «They might also have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We'll know more when the police identify the body.»

«We don’t have the time to chase this down,» Lúcio warns.

«Probably not,» Winston admits. «We're spread too thin already. We’ll have to rely on Ana and Soldier: 76. Soldier, you need to draw him out before he arrives at the strike point, but don’t engage. Give Ana her shot.»

A more staticky connection flickers in; their conversation is beaming back to Gibraltar, to their worried teammates.

«Please,» Mercy says. «Please. Talon took Gabriel because I was too proud to let him die. I let them do this. His existence has been on my conscience for seven years, Ana. Don’t miss. Don't add Jack's life to the toll.»

«I don’t miss,» Ana says quietly.

76 blinks behind his visor, the conversation going forward while he counts backward. Seven years? It is, now, since Zurich. Two years since the recall. It’s only a number; he’s not counting his age anymore.  

_And Jamie Morrison sings to his son:_

_"Ay at the end of seven years we pay a tithe to hell;  
_ _I am so fair and full of flesh I fear it be myself"_

Odd. Never even one of his dad’s favorite songs. But the memory’s so clear.

“I’m at the rendezvous.” He doesn’t look up.

«I see you,» Ana says, on their private channel.

He forces himself not to look up. He won’t take the slightest chance of giving Ana’s position away.

“Anything yet?”

«No. The speech is not for another few hours. Lúcio reports that the Mayor and Miss Aliveira are currently under his guard, and will be coming to the venue in a bulletproof car. Fareeha is looking for vessels in the water; we will see them if they come by sea.»

The streets are already getting crowded; there are three major arteries that come togfether in a T-intersection at the the amphitheater. If he strays too far down any any of them, and chooses wrong, he won’t have time to correct. If he stays too close to the hit point, he won’t be able to kite Reaper away.

He shifts uneasily, drifting back into an alley to let a group of young folk come past, running and laughing in dance clothes, heading off to their assigned spot before the parade starts.

The riot of music clashes with the song stuck in his head.

_Janet tied her kirtle green a bit above her knee_  
_And she's gone to Carter Hall as fast as go can she  
_ _"Oh, tell to me, Tam Lin," she said, "why came you here to dwell?"_

_”For my sins, Bloomington. For my sins. What about you?”_

Memories plow into each other. The song crashes to a halt, and the memory of Gabriel's voice spears through him. The voice of a young Jack Morrison, answering, twists the knife.

_”To get out of fucking Bloomington. It was either the army or the circus.”_

_”And you chose the army?”_ Even at the ripe old age of 25, Gabriel had withering skepticism down to an art.

Somewhere in the past, Jack gave him a cocky wink. _”Would you believe I’m allergic to elephants?”_

Gabe had been his terrifyingly unapproachable, terrifyingly competent, terrifyingly beautiful, generally terrifying senior officer, and that was the day Jack Morrison first heard him laugh.

76 pulls himself together, leaning against the worn brick of the alley wall. “Anything new?”

«Not in the last five minutes, Jack. Get yourself something to eat. You’ll need your strength.»

“Says the woman who’s been in a sniper nest for the last six hours.”

«That woman has been up here for six hours with plenty of water and a supply of chicken coxinha in an insulated pack, because she thinks ahead,» Ana chuckles. «There is a stall that sells kibbeh and cheese bread on your six, twenty meters out. Go eat.»

He doesn’t grace her with a response, but he does go eat, tucking his mask in his pocket next to Winston’s field generator. The aftertaste of the morning’s ration bar makes the taste of real food even more intense. His appetite fires up, demands proteins and carbohydrates, and he has to stop himself before he clears out the little stall’s whole supply. The proprietor laughs, and tosses him a bottle of water he didn’t pay for-- “For a good customer. Don’t choke, good customer!”

He does have to admit that he feels better with the food in him. Once he’s cleaned the grease off his face and replaced the mask, he starts his prowl with a renewed focus, scanning for any sign of Talon activity.

The morning wears on. He sees fire dancers; he sees more kinds of dance than he can identify. He doesn’t see Talon. At least his time in the armed forces taught him to expect this kind of ‘hurry up and wait’ scenario.

An hour and a half before the speech, Genji’s voice comes across the comms, positively dripping with glee.

«You will never guess who Jesse has just spotted. Old friends! Not even in disguise, fools, as if they think no-one knows their faces anymore. We have traced them to a maintenance van; they are posing as a repair company. McCree will cut them off. I will cut them down.»

«Hold up, let Fareeha get eyes on you first,» Lúcio orders.

«Yes, mission commander.»

«Eyes on. Don’t make me come down there, boys.»

«We’d never inconvenience a lady, would we, Genji?»

«Because we are such gentlemen,” Genji snorts. “Going radio silent now. See you on the other side.»

The whole thing takes all of fifteen minutes; Fareeha keeps the rest of them apprised and the ex-Blackwatch agents pop back onto the comms before long to report no injuries, no casualties--

«Some headaches, some heavy bondage,» McCree drawls.

«Gross,» Fareeha groans, to a chorus of chuckles.

«I hate to step on a moment of success,» Winston cuts in, voice tense.

76 is already gearing up. His hearing sharpens. The hair on the back of his neck stands on end.

«The mayor heard about the shooting victim. She’s afraid of the assassination attempt. She’s  pushing the speech forward, hoping to get done before the assassin can react.»

«Idiot! Widowmaker is probably already in place,» Ana groans.

«I agree, but Lúcio couldn’t talk her out of it. He at least got her to agree to take Reinhardt with her for protection.»

A new line connects in. «This is Satya Vaswani. The timetable of the celebrations has changed. The Vishkar security techs are moving, I believe reacting to Talon movement. I am sending you all their locations in real time. I will try to convince them to work with you or withdraw.»

«Thanks,» Lúcio says curtly-- but 76 appreciates how much restraint it’s taking not to say more. Like the younger agent, he thinks these security techs are completely aware of the charade they’re about to take part in.  Their contact is too loyal to her company-- ironically, given the information she’s currently streaming to them-- to admit that.

«Seconded. We have a chance to save lives today, Miss Vaswani. This could be much worse without your help,» Winston adds, a little more diplomatically. «Ana, Soldier-- we have an identity on our shooting victim. He was a parade performer, an equestrian.»

«There are performers on horseback everywhere,» Ana hisses.

"Look for the most dramatic costumes," 76 says flatly. Ana's snort of laughter crackles in his ear.

«Be careful, you two. Please.»

«Always» Ana promises.

76 grunts. He’ll do his best. No promises from him.

They cut off the main channel completely, tuning out the chatter. They’ll be alerted if someone uses their callsigns, but they both need laser focus as long as they can get it.

«I see a group of horseback performers on the north approach. They are gathering attention. How fast can you get to the location marked?»

He pulls his data-reader half out of his pocket, looks at the crowd between him and his objective, a stretch of road bordered by buildings on one side, the blue sea on the other.  “Five minutes. Two if I cause a stir.”

«No stir yet, but move. Something about them…» her voice trails off.

“What do you see, Ana? I trust your instincts.”

«One of the performers is not as active as the others. He has not engaged in any of the tricks some of the others are using. And… Jack, you know Gabriel even better than I, answer me with your heart.»

“Go on.”

«The rider is in the mask of an owl, with a cloak made to look like bone and feather. The horse is white.  Would he take the risk to be _that_ obvious, just for the sake of dramatics?»

It’s not even a question to him. “Yes.”

He can see the rider now, and may only be imagining the way something twangs in him. A connection, after all. A bond drawn tight. He starts to shoulder to the front of the crowd, as the first of the horseback performers start to trot by. Two of them wave to the crowd, and then gracefully get to their feet on the saddles, performing a graceful swap between horses to a wave of cheers. 76 only barely notices, eyes fixed on the owl.

It’s actually a white horse, not a gray-- the pale skin under the white hair makes it look a little ghostly. His certainty deepens.

«I think you are right,» Ana says soberly. «Try to stay out of my way this time, Jack. Do not engage him unless I fail.» Unspoken; she will not fail.

The crowd noise is overwhelming. His hands are clenching into fists, over and over again, as the equestrian group trots by. The performer on the white horse looks no different than anyone else, but he knows Gabriel Reyes and the bone deep dramatic streak that runs through him. Death comes riding a pale horse. The other riders stream past, and he tunes out the crowd, finds the silence in his mind, counts the horses as they pass, catches himself humming too late.

_-oh first let pass the black, lady,_

_And too let pass the brown-_

He sees the future unspool. He’ll get the wraith’s attention; Reaper will know it's a setup instantly, but he won’t be expecting the field device, he’ll be expecting a shot or for 76 to charge him like he usually does.

The horses jingle by, their riders laughing, waving to the crowd.

_-oh first let pass the black, lady_

76 will let him make the first rush, stun him with Winston’s device halfway. And then Ana will sink Mercy's counter-agent into the Reaper's neck, and then they'll see if there's enough left of Gabriel Reyes in him to die, heart or no heart.

_-and too let pass the brown-_

It's going to work; he can feel it in his aching old bones. Mercy’s not taking any more chances. She wouldn’t have risked this if she weren’t completely certain. Winston’s not taking chances either.

_-and too let pass the brown-_

The rider on the pale horse jerks its masked face to look at him.

76 lifts his hand, pulls his own mask off, forces Reaper to acknowledge him.

«Target acquired,» Ana breathes.

All that is left of Jack Morrison comes up like bile in his stomach, like a flood in his veins, like poison, like a roaring fire consuming a dry old oak. His hands stop shaking.

"No," he rasps.

«76, what are you doing?»

_But quickly run-_

He hurls himself at Reaper’s mount, giving it a swat on the flank that makes it rear up and scream and try to kick him. He grabs it by the saddle and lets its wild swing take him along, clinging to its side as it clears the crowd around them. It’s a well-trained beast but it’s just been spooked hard and something’s hanging onto it; it thinks it’s about to die and it bucks at its two burdens like a wild thing.

_-to the milk white horse-_

Gabriel Reyes was a city boy and he's learned a lot during seven years of afterlife but he's not a natural horseman. He loses his seat and 76 gets his arms around his waist, going limp and letting his added weight do the rest of the work.

_pull you his rider down_

They crash to the ground and 76 rolls them to the side, the white horse dancing away from the two of them. The smarter bystanders are trying to round up the drunkards and tourists, keep them out of harm’s way and give the other riders room to work. Despite their efforts, 76 can see too many cameras pointing in their direction, too many daredevils starting to close the distance for a better view. He needs to get clear of potential hostages and surveillance, and that’s going to be impossible in the crowd.

«76! Morrison! Idiot! What did I say?» Ana bellows in his ear. He can’t let go of Reaper so he just  bashes his head against the ground, deactivating or breaking his earpiece. Either way, the distraction goes silence. There’s a similar comm-line chatter coming from under Reaper’s hood, and it distracts the wraith for the second 76 needs to choose his next move.

He wrestles Reaper away from the street, toward the beach and the gleaming sea. Winston’s device is an accusing weight in his pocket, but _no_ , this is something only he can do, with his bare hands and his will.

Reaper’s hands boil with smoke, the gleam of gunmetal half-there and gone, but shotguns are a piss-poor tool when your attacker is at arm’s reach or closer. 76 bears him down, grabs him by the mask and smacks his head into the sidewalk, as hard as he can, as many times as he can before the leather cords of the mask tear. The shotguns dissolve back into smoke before they ever fully manifest.

Reaper's face is half obscured in that same smoke but 76 can see the corpselike face-- Gabe’s face, given to death. The skin crawls-- there's a shredded patch of cheek that shows teeth and gumline, there's skin dripping away from one eye-socket like wax, and as one hole repairs itself another opens. He sees it in flashes as they grapple, as they go over the little barrier that separates road from beachfront, fall a few feet and land in white sand with a thud.

Beach-goers and performers scream and scatter; nobody who gets a good look at the Reaper’s face wants a second one. Even the would-be phone camera journalists stop at the edge of the road, deciding that maybe any closer is too close.

76 can see the Reaper’s face clearly, now, in terrible decaying flux. He’s read more than his share of military history and he thinks of the history of scurvy, now, of all things, at all times. Old wounds never really heal-- they just scar, however invisibly, bound up imperfectly with collagen. Remove that-- push the body so far into nutrient starvation that it can no longer maintain itself-- and the scars open up again, fresh and new as if cut by some invisible knife. Old sailors dying without their teeth, with their skin ripping itself apart, they must have thought they were cursed.

Morrison had known all of Reyes' scars, kissed them, adored them. 76 recognizes the placement of the gashes that heal and tear and then heal imperfectly again, even as an open wound on Reaper's cheek bone accidentally generates a few teeth and then re-absorbs them, as an eye blinks open under a slice that nestles in the curve of his jaw. He knows which scars are from the war, from his tenure in Blackwatch-- he knows which ones must be new, earned in the blast in Zurich.

Reaper glares at him, showing no emotion more intense than mild irritation, and grabs him by the throat.

76 surprises him by not resisting; he lets himself be drawn forward and keeps going, slamming his forehead against a just-formed mouth above Reaper's left eye, knocking teeth into god knows where. Reaper groans in frustration and his grip loosens just enough for 76 to break his hold and pin him in his own costume.

They wrestle for leverage in the sand-- Reaper almost ducks his grasp by slithering out of his colourful costume, bones cracking as his shoulder-blades touch and his body folds in half to fit through the neckline, shedding the cloth like a snake, but 76 grabs him by the neck and holds on, gets his legs wrapped around Reaper's torso, forces him into a wrestling hold face down in the sand with his left arm pinned to his back.  

Reaper writhes and shudders under him, body reforming face-up in a sudden fitful jerk. The body armor he was wearing doesn’t make the transition; it’s suddenly backwards and 76 is holding his right arm now, but he doesn’t let go.

A Heartless man feels no fear, but Reaper’s doing an excellent impression of panicking. He thrashes, levers off the sand with a too-long arm and slams 76 down into it, pinning the soldier under the fluctuating weight of his body. The autopsy incision in his half-bared torso gapes, a y-section maw full of grinding teeth and barbed tongues, and 76 feels them shred through his jacket and his skin as he twists and drives an elbow into the gap.

The wraith is losing control of his shape, smoke shedding off of him, forming and reforming into vaguely animal shapes, with no limbs, with too-many limbs. He bucks 76 like a bull and 76 feels a tooth crack as his jaw rattles, feels the bruises as he's slammed down over, and over, and over, and he holds on.  

Reaper howls with something like rage and 76 presses himself close-- feels mouths open under him to bite and draw blood-- drives his ankle into where the kidneys should be, pins Reaper’s  arms even as they become tentacles, become hooks, become bludgeons. 76 takes the hits and slashes without flinching, fights close in with elbows and shoulders and his own thick skull, and Reaper tries to shake him, and Reaper cannot shake him, and he holds on.

"What--" it comes out of five mouths, a shaking, rasping sound. "What--hot--"

Through the torn leather of his gloves, 76 can feel it. Reaper's impossible body is overheating like an engine-- already feverish where it should be cold and dead, and that heat is steadily growing. Part of him knew this was coming. Jamie Morrison’s voice warned him.

Reaper’s struggles are faltering now, and it could be a ruse. No-- the wraith hisses in pain and twists aimlessly away from his own body, now trying to get away from his own burning flesh as energetically as he’s trying to break out of 76’s grip.

“Jack-- what are you doing?” there’s real distress, real fury in the deep rasp. “Hurts. HURTS.”  

No time to puzzle out what that means.

"Come on." 76 unlocks his legs-- it hurts to do it, to move calf-muscles cramped in place and unfold his battered knees-- and wraps his arm tighter around Reaper's chest. "Come on. The water."

No well water here, the warm sea is just going to have to work. He’s insane for thinking any of this will work. But it has to. His Gabriel, he’s going to get him _back_.

"Let-- go, let go-"

"Shut up," he barks. He can smell burning bone, burning flesh. His arm is in agony; there's an inferno under Reaper's skin and touching him is like holding red-hot iron. He hefts Reaper's weight over his shoulder and starts to stagger towards the water, smelling his jacket as it starts to smoke, feeling the skin under it start to blister.

A burning gleed, the old ballads warned him-- a burning cinder. It’s what Reaper’s skin looks like now, crackling and lit red from below.

"Jack, it's going to -- burn you, Jack, please, Jack," Reaper begs, clawing at his arm; the wound cauterizes as it tears, the blood hisses and boils where it touches the Reaper's skin.

76 holds on. Another seven meters to the water. Six. Five. The sand whistles like a kettle as the moisture boils out of it under Reaper's dragging legs and feet. Any brave onlookers who hadn’t run when Reaper’s form started to change are definitely running now.

Reaper’s eyes burn red. He’s staring at 76’s visor as if he can look through it, and now he’s desperate. "Jack, let go, you’re burning, you’re going to burn, I can't lose you, I can't-"

A rogue wave comes lapping up to them, and the hiss of steam drowns out the Reaper's pleading. 76 can feel every tear in his tactical pants, where the steam condenses and fries him, and then they're up to their knees in the water and then Reaper's body actually catches fire, and 76 grabs him tight and drags him down into the waves.

* * *

When the police arrive there's no trace of the two men who terrorized the parade-goers and fell into the sea. There are five hundred people who swear they saw it all; four hundred are lying. Widowmaker gives her position when she takes a shot-- failed-- at Soldier: 76, and Ana’s answering bullet smashes her scope, makes her withdraw enraged.

The agents of Talon find their bombs defused, their traps dismantled, and their fine new weapons suddenly inoperational; they step out of hiding to wreak old-fashioned mayhem and find themselves surrounded by the local police, pinned down by an overwatch agent. Vishkar only has a few stragglers to clean up.

Rio stands, victorious, Lúcio blasting the news of Talon’s route over the entire listening crowd as Maria Justo de Aliveira takes the stage alongside the mayor, her voice ringing with conviction as she calls for peace, for community, for a city built by citizens and not contractors, even for a measure of forgiveness and reconciliation with the Omnics who were forced to build the Rio of old-- and might help rebuild it, if offered a chance at peace, respect, and compensation.

People listen.  Some angrily, but they listen, and they go away thinking harder than they did before.

When the agents of Overwatch regroup, exhausted, battered and triumphant, there’s little to do but listen to the police-band chatter in stunned silence.

Jesse McCree goes astray-- tells them, at least, where he’s going, but makes a beeline for Soldier: 76’s last known location. He slides through the crowds with surprising subtlety, finds himself a lookout point in an alley.

He’s got one ear on the comms, one out for the conversations happening around him, but it’s already descending into tall-tale, splintering into different details even just within hearing radius. Nobody knows-- not the locals, and damn sure not Overwatch.

Ana yelled ‘the idiot is engaging’ and dropped radio contact almost as soon as 76 did. Speculations as to what the hell happened are as rife as they are uninformed. If any of the conflicting witness statements agree on one thing, it was the fire that consumed the two men’s bodies.

«Perhaps it was the sympathetic magic Angela spoke of. Perhaps our old friend had to sacrifice himself to ensure the Reaper’s destruction,»  Reinhardt says, so affected that his voice falls to normal conversational volume.

«Yeah, he's a smart one,»  is Fawkes’ unwelcome input from back in the Watchpoint. «Fire kills jestabout everything, dunnit?»

Maybe it was a trap by Reaper. Maybe the old soldier finally lost his grip on his mind. Maybe Ana had to shoot him. Any idea is as valid as any other, except possibly Fawkes’ later diversion into the theories of spontaneous human combustion.

«They may yet have survived. There is great power in such love,» is Hanzo's hypothesis. It is not a popular one. «He chose to share Reyes’ destiny for better or worse, and the gods take notice of such devotion.»

Jesse can’t bring himself to believe it. He’d like to believe the old bastards got a second chance. He’d like almost nothing more. But it sounds too pretty to be true.

"I don’t think we’re lookin’ at a happy ending, darlin’,” he points out regretfully. “76 was pretty sure he couldn’t love anyone anymore.”

Even across the distance between Rio and Watchpoint Gibraltar, Hanzo’s voice is infinitely warm, like a steadying touch, an embrace. It kindles that little bit of hope in Jesse’s chest.

«So were you.»

* * *

Miles down the beach, dragged by the current and dragged further by pure spite, Reaper comes to with a very mundane pain in his ribs and a very human terror that he can't breathe.

He's barely come to grips with that when something small and hard slams into his chest again, and he coughs water onto his chest. There's more where that came from; he sucks in a breath that gurgles and coughs again, saltwater coming out foamy and full of black particulate.

"If you are going to throw up, do it on Jack," Ana says, poised over him, thin, strong hands linked and ready to jackhammer into his naked chest again. He coughs-- much less water-- and waves her away desperately while his ribs are still in one piece.

His ribs are in one piece?

They're in the shadow of a seawall, who knows how far from where he went into the water, and the beach is miraculously empty. The memories of the last-- hour? Five minutes? -- are a blur he can’t make sense of. A tenacious grip on him, something that held his body together as it swelled and warped. The pain in his chest, the fire under his skin. His armor burning off.

Jack dragging him into the sea.

"Jack-?"

Terror again. Jack. Jack burning, Jack bleeding, Jack sinking with him in the water, too much like the older memories of when they burned when he realized Jack was in the Zurich headquarters when he realized that there was actually a bomb-

He sits bolt upright, abdominal muscles screaming, only to find one arm restrained-- he looks down and sees pale fingers locked around his wrist like a handcuff. Pale fingers on a pale hand on a jacket-clad arm still safely attached to a living, breathing man. Jack’s mask is long gone, left somewhere in the water, and his visor lies broken by his head.

His eyes open, cloudy blue.

"Jackie," Gabriel breathes.

"Soldier," Jack mutters hoarsely. "Seventy-six."

"Soldier seventy-bullshit." It comes out as an almost hysterical laugh.

The sound startles him. He hasn't laughed in--

"What did you do?"

He brings his free hand up to his chest, as if he can press in and touch what’s in there. It's not empty. He doesn't know what’s rattling around in there, he doesn't know if he wants to know, but he can feel horror and joy and grief sloshing around like volatile chemicals, just waiting for the catalyst that will start some explosive chain reaction.

His skin feels strange. Whole. His nerves are all working and they keep working, as the seconds pass and they don't decay and re-grow, just sit under his skin functioning, telling him that he's cold, that he's bruised, that he's mostly naked on the sand and he's not going to like where that sand winds up.

He realizes that he's breathing, still.

"What did you do?" he whispers.

"Something... old... and stupid.” Jack breathes. He looks like hell. But he’s alive, and somehow he’s not burned half to death.

"Old and stupid? Just like you, jackass." He laughs again, but it's choked by the sob that follows.

"Gabriel?" Ana whispers.

"Yeah." He meets her eyes, helpless. He wants to tease her, provoke her, say something gruff and shitty, but the memories of bantering and fighting are overwhelming him. They’re too present, too intense. He can feel again. Ana’s here, and part of him growls danger and part of him breathes safety.

"It's me," he says, stupidly.

She stoops like a falcon, crashes into his chest, and he wraps his free arm around her.

Her face is wet where she presses her cheek to his-- she must have wept as she tried to resuscitate him, but she's smiling now, laughing as stupidly as he is, and his tears mingle with hers as he rocks with her in the sand.

The grip on his wrist loosens, and Jack makes a little sound of pain as he finally lets go. Gabriel turns, reaching out for him as if he's going to vanish.

"Don't you go anywhere, Golden Boy."

Jack freezes, lets Gabriel pull him in by the collar but doesn't respond when Gabriel presses their lips together.

"Jackie?" he murmurs, against those scarred lips.

"I-- can’t," Jack says stiffly, and pulls away. He looks down at his hand, flexes it carefully, inspects it for injury as if it’s more of a priority than the reunion happening beside him.

Gabriel shoots a pleading look at Ana, who looks down and shakes her head.

"It is nothing that was done to him," she murmurs. "He has simply ... stopped feeling. His heart still beats, but he has made it only an organ."

"Oh, my baby," Gabriel moans. "Oh, you dumbass."

"I'm sorry." Jack is still staring at his fucking hand.

"Don't you dare apologize, Morrison, don't you-" he has to let Ana go to grab Jack by both shoulders. He gives him a sharp shake, forcing those blue eyes to focus on him again.  "Don't -- don't, don't, you saved me, you don't get to apologize-"

"I can't give you anything," Jack says flatly. "There's nothing left. I ruined it."

"Shut up. Idiot. You're here. You're here, I remember how to love you, this is everything." He reaches down, drags Jack’s hand up to his chest, flattening the fingers out over his breastbone, pressing the palm where his… heart, maybe, is. Jack’s stiff fingers slide over the Y-incision, thumb tracing it down to the center of his chest almost involuntarily.

"I can feel. I can feel,” Gabriel babbles, “So you shut up and you let me kiss you, all right, asshole? You don't have to do anything, you don't have to feel anything, just let me-"

"Yes," Jack says, and that's enough.

Gabriel surges forward, kisses his motionless lips and presses his cheek against them-- he can feel Jack breathing, little warm puffs of air over all those newly durable nerves. He wants to taste Jack-- he puts out his tongue, tastes saltwater on his cheek, tastes the leather of his coat, inhales and tastes brine in his hair. He could cry.

Ah, fuck, he may actually cry.

"Gabriel!" Ana says, alarmed, and he realizes that he's currently sporting at least three mouths too many.

"Looks like that's staying," he murmurs, frowning at the slit on his hand until it closes up, equal parts fascinated and horrified. "...ah, Jackie, maybe it's good you're not happy to see me." It isn't. It isn't. It isn't. But it might actually hurt more the other way, if that’s possible. "This kind of thing seems like a deal killer."

"It's not," Jack says flatly. “Never. Nothing could be.”

"...I don't think I want to hear this. I'm going to get transport," Ana sighs. "Boys, try to put yourselves together before I get back."

She brushes sand off of her knees and stomps off toward a staircase that leads off the narrow beach, up to whatever unfortunate boulevard is about to be taken by Egyptian siege.

Gabriel finds that he has no idea what to say to Jack's bizarre declaration, especially in light of those blank eyes and the straight, unsmiling slash of his mouth. He also finds, unfortunately, that he is in fact starting to tear up.

Seven years of accrued trauma will do that to a man, he knows, but that doesn't mean he doesn't resist it, closing his eyes, burying his face in Jack's neck the way he used to, because there is one and only one person on this bitch of an earth that he trusts to see him this vulnerable.

Jack's arms come stiffly around him.

"I think... I miss loving you," Jack whispers into his ear.

His own words, jarring, bringing back a memory of not-feeling that he now feels far too much about. He hadn’t had a word for his response to Jack’s fingers tangling in his, and now retrospectively, more than a year later he aches with how much he needed the other man.

"I miss it too."  He shudders. "You think you can fake it until I'm done sobbing like a snotty kid?"

"I can," Jack says, as if he's only just now realizing that that's an option. “I will.”

"Good. Now shut up and hold me."

And Jack does. And it's almost enough, at least for now, at least for this, as Gabriel falls apart only metaphorically in his arms. His now mostly-functional body holds together, although he continues to shiver-- if that's shock or just the fact that he's wet and mostly naked in a sea breeze it's hard to say. Either way, the spasms lessen a little when Jack lets go of him long enough to strip off his blue jacket and drape it around him, still wet but better insulation than nothing.

He cradles Jack’s cheek with his palm and feels stubble under his lips-- well shit-- but Jack just leans back a little and considers the mouth stubbornly reforming itself into the meat of Gabriel’s hand. Then he kisses it hesitantly, eyes open, brow furrowed slightly, and Gabe’s whole body jerks.

Gabriel remembers how they danced in Paris, a parody of how they loved each other once, and how he’d felt as close to happy as a Heartless creature could. Jack is going through the motions now like he did then, and it’s still enough to rattle him down to the core.

He sinks into Jack’s arms, kisses his neck chastely and kisses his lips with a mouth he shouldn’t have and burrows into his heat and starts to shake again as he feels another of the dark swells of deferred misery that’s ready to come take its pound of new flesh.

It comes like a flash flood.

A bellow of rage swells up in him and comes out in a sob, muffled into Jack’s broad shoulder. Everything’s turned up to eleven, everything’s in full saturation, the memories he wants to bury himself in come tangled up with the memories he just wants to bury. Poor-Fucking-Amelie and Fucking-Fucking-Moira and OH FUCK MCCREE is the kid okay his heart exploded and the taste of a soul and smoke rubble targets bodies -

He howls against Jack’s skin, and Jack holds on to him.

He’s mostly stopped screaming into Jack’s chest when Ana comes back.  For the time being, anyway. There are memories out of the corner of his mind’s eye that are going to keep him up for years to come, but he’s got a handle on himself for the moment. Jack lets him up reluctantly, frowning a little at his tear-streaked face, swiping the tracks away briskly with his thumb.

Ana has tourist trap sweatpants for him and an I ♥ RIO t-shirt three sizes too big, but they're dry, and they're perfect. He drapes Jack’s wet coat over the shirt and follows her up to the street level; she's hired a driverless vehicle under an identity neither of them recognize, and it whisks them away through the city, away from the bulk of the crowds and the celebrations.

Jack is barely present; not speaking, not looking at either of them, face tight with what looks like pain.

But Gabriel takes his hand in the car, and Jack holds on to him.

 

* * *

 

76 and Gabriel rinse off in the shower of a hotel room Ana somehow manages to find-- magic in and of itself on a holiday like this. They’re not ready to regroup. Ana turns on the TV, switching until she finds anything but breaking news, and leaves the two to their shower.

76 looks at the man in his arms and feels nothing-- and that hurts, but even the pain is distant. Gabriel is plastered against him as close as physically possible: his arms are tight around 76’s back, and even the tendrils of smoke he still gives off twine around 76’s body before they dissipate.

“Should I be kissing you?”

“Yeah, Boyscout,” Gabriel murmurs, smiling. “Good call. You should.”

He feels awkward pressing numb kisses over Gabriel’s temple and cheek, but Gabriel responds as if he’s doing it right. Gabriel feels good against him, warm wet skin pleasurable in the immediate animal way, but he knows there’s supposed to be more. Gabriel deserves more and he can’t give it to him.

Gabriel leans back and turns his head to catch a kiss on the lips, biting down lightly to keep 76 from going anywhere. Gabriel’s mouth is cool and it tastes like smoke, now, a little like old blood. Maybe it always will. 76 wasn’t lying; that’s not a deal killer. Nothing except Gabriel’s explicit command could keep him away, even if there’s only a shell of him left for the other man.

“I can hear you dressing yourself down, you know,” Gabriel murmurs against his mouth. He leans up, kisses 76’s forehead. “Like one of our old drill sergeants, cussing yourself out because you think you’re not performing up to standards.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry, because you couldn’t hold the world on your shoulders and not sprain something. Sorry, because you ripped yourself into pieces doing what you had to and it still wasn’t enough.” Gabriel laughs, low and horrible. “Yeah, baby, I know you are. Oh, Jack. Fuck. I’m sorry too.”

He leans back a little further; meets Jack’s eyes. His own are still blood red, irises black.

He probably loves it, Jack thinks, and manages a shadow of a smile.  

“Look at you in knots,” Gabriel says, and touches the edge of that smile with his thumb. “I’m a mess too, lover. I’m just treading water in my own head now-- fuck, there’s so much. There’s just  so much. My body’s new again, too, there’s going be a learning curve, and that sucked the first time when I _couldn’t_ feel fear.”

He kisses Jack again. Again.

“What a pair of shitshows, huh?” he murmurs lovingly.

76 can’t convey how much less of a mess Gabe is than he is.

76 can’t even keep his own head straight now. The line he drew between Jack Morrison and 76 is starting to disintegrate, and it’s taking the whole place with it.

He distracts himself by kissing Gabriel hard, lips-jaw-neck-shoulder, back to the neck where he knows it makes Gabriel crazy. Gabriel spasms when he runs his teeth across the skin, flinches away.

“Fuck. Fuck me, that’s-- no, you didn’t hurt me, stop looking at me like that.”  Gabe reaches up to pull his head forward, resting their foreheads together. “I just haven’t felt pleasure in seven years and everything’s a little too much. Which. Give me a week, Jackie, and then we’re both going to have fun with that.”

“We should turn the water off,” Jack says.

Gabe just smiles at him, as if his rudeness is charming. “Conscientious, boyscout.  All right, turn around, we’re both going to be sticky if we don’t actually rinse. Salt water’s a bear. There you go, gorgeous. Damn, look at all these muscles. I missed every one of them,” he croons, as he lathers up the little bar of hotel soap and rinses Jack with his hands.  

“Now go dry off. I’ll be out in a sec,” he says, with a playful little push to the small of Jack’s back, and a last kiss on his shoulderblade.  Jack goes, stepping out of the tub obediently. He watches the silhouette of Gabriel rinsing himself as he dries himself off.

“Pass a towel, sunshine,” Gabriel says, opening the curtain and letting out another puff of steam mixed with black smoke. He holds out a hand still tipped in black claws. Not even close to a dealbreaker. He could be Gabe stepping out of the shower in any memory and it stops Jack in his tracks.  

So many memories, all too distant, Jack can’t touch them anymore, he destroyed what they had-

“Towel, Jack.” Gabriel takes it from his trembling hand. He runs it over his scalp, down his chest, and looks up to see Jack still frozen in place.

“Hey.”  

“Hey,” Jack whispers.

“This mess you’re in?” Gabriel holds his gaze. “Not a deal killer. Never. Nothing could be.”

It’s suddenly hard to breathe; his lungs just won’t expand.

“I’m with you, Jack.”  Gabriel lets the towel fall. He takes Jack’s hand, fixes a few too many eyes on him, every one of them kind and protective. “You and me to the end.”

Jack squeezes his hand tight, desperate.

Maybe Gabe can save him, if they hang on to each other. He wants to be saved.

“I’m with you,” Gabriel repeats, like a vow. Till death do us part, but they’re past all that. Death cannot them part, it looks like.

“Help me,” Jack whispers, and Gabriel pulls him back into his arms, and holds on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "That's not how horses work"  
> -[distressed noises] 
> 
> "That's not what guillemets are for"  
> -[more distressed noises] 
> 
> "Did you even think about the implications of moving the fairy procession from Halloween to Shrove Tuesday"  
> -[distressed noises intensify] 
> 
> "Those quotes are from at least three different versions of Tam Lin"  
> -[distressed noiSES INTENSIFY]
> 
> "So how's the next chapter of man in twilight coming, mmm?"  
> -[DISTRESSED NOISES INTENSIFY]


	3. The Fate of the Heartless Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sombra attempts revenge, Gabe attempts to be calm, Jack attempts to be human, and Ana attempts not to sprain her remaining eye rolling it so damn hard at all of these kids.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **TW THIS CHAPTER:** Heads up, this chapter contains a body cavity search that hits several common sexual assault triggers. 
> 
> Other content warnings: Jack and Gabe have PTSD. Jack has a dissociative episode, Gabe has a full blown panic attack and several threatened ones. Non-explicit flashback to surgical trauma and some shady black-ops practices. . 
> 
> Should note-- there's a pregnancy scare that the characters play off for laughs, because I know surprise pregnancy/jokes about it are a thing for people. 
> 
> \--
> 
> You may have noticed that the chapter count is not what it was. This spiralled slightly out of control, and the last chapter has been divided first into this one, and an upcoming epilogue. Sorry, folks.

Rio's a nice place for a vacation, but it's a shitty place for a hacker. Vishkar left most of the locals so skittish about modern technology that they won't stand for anything but the occasional low-res traffic camera. Whole swathes of the city aren’t wired. Cash is king more places than it isn’t.

It takes _hours_ for Sombra to track down Soldier: 76 and his damn sniper friend. That suspicious old biddy took cash out on one side of town and bought a hotel room with it on the other. The withdrawal was for much more than the cost of the hotel-- Sombra couldn't connect the dots until she remembered to factor in the cost of a bribe big enough to get someone else kicked out of their pre-booked room.

Her trouble wasn’t over when she found the hotel, either. It’s in the middle of a cellular dead zone and it’s 20th century vintage-- the locks on the doors are old tumbler-key systems, with deadbolts and chains. Prehistoric and unhackable.

The wifi reception is too intermittent to access her heart. That keeps the impatience at bay as she sneaks in old-school. She wouldn't be tapping that part of her anyway; she got enough of it yesterday. When she connected to it she just got overwhelming bursts of data cutting in and out, overloading the broadband available. It gave her a headache, and a mission statement. She'll deal with the actual feelings later when she's somewhere secure.

Holding a drink carrier of empty cups in one hand, she knocks on the hotel room door. Quiet steps approach the door.

"Hello?"

"Room service," she chirps, showing the cups. "Two coffees."

"We did not order coffee," the voice says, suspicious.

"No? Well, this is the room number. If you're not gonna take them I guess they're gonna be thrown out. You want them anyway?"

The room’s occupant steps away from the door to have a muffled conversation with someone else, and then the door opens, revealing a small dusky-skinned older woman with a tattoo under one eye.

Sombra drops the cups and translocates, pistol out and pointed at the woman's back.

The old woman chuckles and shuts the door. Then-- and Sombra cannot feel fear but she knows when she should-- the old woman engages the deadbolt.

"I have survived being shot by much bigger guns, dear. Can you survive a pulse rifle?"

Something cold nudges her temple. She turns her head just a little, to take in the rifle and the grizzled old man holding it. She’s never seen him without his mask on before. His eyes are hidden by a visor, but there's something familiar about his face. Something worth knowing, if she can get out of this alive.

Neither of the two occupants of the room look surprised to see her. She realizes with only an echo of frustration that she's been played. She blames the dark-ages infrastructure of the city; these senior citizens had an advantage.

"A word of advice." Ana Amari says, turning daintily, stepping to one side. Sombra doesn't bother to track her with the pistol; she couldn't get both her targets like this, couldn’t complete her mission. She'll have to play her cards right and live to fight another day. She’s not even sure this is worth it. She remembers being sure, but remembering doesn’t stack up to a pulse rifle to her head.

"I don't need your advice," she says.

"Yes you do. Fill the cups next time, kid," Soldier: 76 rasps. "Hot liquid's a good improvised weapon, and people always notice if you get the weight wrong."

"Unless you're a distraction for a better hit team," Amari muses, for all the world like she's talking about her flower garden to a bunch of other old ladies. "Talon would not have sent you on your own. How soon do we expect your friends?"

"Talon didn't send me," she says, the ghost of petulance in her voice. "The Reaper sent me.”

And suddenly the structure of the pattern, the understanding of the world she has built on information, splinters into disorder because there is a third occupant of the room. There should not have been a third occupant. There were no hints there would be a third, and especially not one with _that voice._

"I don't remember ordering a hacker," the third voice says, laced with lazy humour.

"Sleep-shopping again, Gabriel? Tsk," Amari says, eyes wrinkling as she smiles. "You make the worst choices at 4 am."

Sombra moves, heedless of the pulse rifle, translocating around the Soldier to get a better view of the man reclining on the bed behind him.

"That was one time," says Gabriel Reyes, and his grin tears up through the muscle of his cheeks a little, showing teeth and gums on both side.

"You’re alive," she says foolishly, her pistol lowering. The Soldier's rifle nudges up against her back. She ignores it.

"Debatable," he says. "But maybe a little more than usual."  He sobers; his Glasgow grin knits itself closed. "Don't kill my friends, chica. They're valuable people to know."

"But you are alive." It isn't possible. "I saw--"

Explaining is analog. She lifts her hands, spreads them out, making a cat's cradle of light that becomes a screen, and loads a video. No lag; she hasn't trusted the cloud with this. She's kept it tucked into her permanent memory since she got hold of it.

It's a fixed camera feed from inside Talon, showing a pair of singed dog-tags resting like a museum piece inside a thick case of bulletproof glass. The security field around the case is only visible as a set of laser emitters lined up like watching eyes in the metal walls.

Reyes leans forward, putting out a hand unconsciously-- the Soldier lets go of his rifle with one hand, the muscles in his other forearm bulging as he keeps it trained on Sombra.

He takes Reyes' hand, squeezes.

Sombra doesn't know what that means. She will, soon, but right now she can't put the pattern back together.

"Eleven oh six am local time, yesterday," She says, waving to the video just as the dog-tags jerk convulsively and fall off of their little display. They tremble briefly on the bottom of the case. Then there's a period of inactivity-- she scrolls forward. "Eleven oh seven, eleven oh eight-" she lets the video go back to real time, as the tags begin to smoke, as if the fire that damaged them in the first place is still burning inside them.

An alarm goes off. The tags are beginning to glow a dull red. Then brighter. Then brighter, chips of rust forming and flaking off.

"Eleven ten." The battered metal is glowing almost too bright to look at, and dark smoke is pouring off of it.

A soldier in Talon black intrudes on the image, her body obscuring the dog tags as she races to disarm the lasers. She steps back, hefting a chemical fire extinguisher and readying the nozzle.  

Then, stupidly, the woman hits another button on the panel to open the glass case. The inrush of fresh air touches the glowing metal and the tags catch like a firework, sparks spraying in every direction.

The Talon soldier recoils for a second, and that's enough; when she brings the fire extinguisher back to bear, there's nothing to extinguish. Even the rust chips have burned away. There's only black smoke-- and then the emergency ventilation kicks on, and that's gone too.

"That's what it looked like on our end, too," Amari says, far too calmly.

Sombra knows. She saw the phone-cam videos.

"That's what it felt like," Gabriel rumbles. “Christ fuck. How did we survive that?"

The Soldier lifts his chin. "There are rules. Old rules. Stupid rules. But there are rules."

Sombra is starting to get claustrophobic. She's trapped in a bubble of meatspace with only flickering data, overpopulated data connections to connect to-- the hotel doesn't even have wifi, it's appalling. She's in a room with people who know more than she does and she doesn’t have any of her usual exits. It’s awful, like being smothered under old wet mattresses.

"I guess I don't have to avenge you, amigo." She shrugs. "So if I promise not to shoot anyone... can I go?"

"Hmmm..." Amari makes a show of considering this.

"Ana, don't try to rattle the kid. She's not going to feel it. And you know we can clear out before she gets Talon on site."

"You're no fun, Gabriel," Amari says fondly. "All right, I suppose."

Soldier: 76 finally lowers his pulse rifle. Finally.  Sombra starts to back towards the door.

"Wait." Gabriel uses his grip on the Soldier's hand to surge to his feet. "Wait, wait, there's something else."

He puts his hands gently on Sombra's shoulders, looking intently into her eyes. "Ogundimu knows about your backup server in Busan."

Another certainty negated. It leaves a hole in the web she uses to weave data into information. "What?"

"One of his fallback plans is to try to swarm you out of the cloud and then lock you in when you think you're safe."

She nods numbly. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because he held my heart in his fist and told me not to." Gabriel steps back and spreads his hands. He grins again-- his cheeks don't split, but skin and muscle tear across one of his biceps and then his arm grins at her too, with jagged teeth.  His other palm follows suit, a small pointed tongue lolling out of the wound in amusement.

"And I don't have to do what he says." He chuckles. "Oh, I thought I could still feel spite, but I couldn't. Not really. Not like this. That's the good hate," he sighs blissfully, and his chuckles deepen into a sepulchral cackle. Smoke pours off of him and wreaths him in a halo of darkness.

Some of the unease that's been pressing down on Sombra recedes; the stack of wet mattresses is only half as high now. There's the Reaper. She was concerned that he'd been... unmade somehow. Made into Gabriel Reyes, an unknown. But no; they're the same person.

Amari rolls her eyes, but watches this spectacle tolerantly. The Soldier is looking at Reaper with unmistakable fondness.

"She owes you now."

"Oh, shut up, Jack. It was a gift," Reaper scoffs.

 _Jack._ A new piece of data. New strands connect, reaching open ended and just waiting for her to research.

"No, he's right," she says. She doesn't leave debts open. Bad, bad practice. For her, anyway; her clients can owe her all the open-ended favors they want.

"Okay. Get my work clothes for me without tipping off Talon. We’ll be square."

She scoffs. "You could ask for a lot more than that, amigo."

"I'm asking for my clothes, though."

She shakes her head.  "Why?"

"These sweatpants say 'Princess' on the ass," Reaper says, and pirouettes so that she can see for herself.

They do, in flowing script. The P is topped with a crown.

"It was what they had with a large enough allowance in the hips," Amari says with a shrug.

"All right. Give me an hour," Sombra decides. “Reaper, you know how to get ahold of me. Set up a meeting. Somewhere civilized, okay?"

"You got it."

His uncanny smile lingers in her memory as she slips like a phantom back toward the vacant office building where Reaper stashed his leather coat and various accessories. Their staging area was in a much nicer side of town-- she finds a connection good enough to do a quick sync, correct her old aberrant data and draw a few more threads.

Cautiously, she accesses her heart.

At first she cries. But then, when the stubborn cloud of data finally, finally accepts the new intel-- Reaper is alive, Reaper is safe, Reaper is free, Reaper is wearing pants that say 'Princess' on the ass-- well. Then she clutches the bag full of black leather and bone close to her chest and laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

* * *

Apparently, to Gabriel's brightly-coiffed young friend, 'civilized' means somewhere with good reception. Ana saw a nice hotel bistro when she was scouting sniper perches, and the financial district has excellent cell and internet service. They settle in for a lazy breakfast, one she feels that all of them are well entitled to.

Gabriel gets in touch with his contact. Ana shoots a text to Fareeha. She isn’t a rogue agent, unlike some men she knows-- she contacted Overwatch as soon as she was sure Jack and Gabriel were safe. She has not told her teammates where they are, though, only given an ETA. She updates it now. The rest of the team may already have left, and it will be jump-jet transport for the three of them-- she can almost feel her old bones rattle already. Her old friends had better appreciate what she goes through for them.

The server gives the three a dubious look as he takes their drink orders, but in street-vendor sunglasses and rumpled clothes they're no more out of place than most of the hungover tourists around them. Gabriel has Jack's jacket tied around his waist despite the warmth of the morning sun; Ana suspects he would be wearing outright if the scorch marks weren't so obvious.

"Are you going to tell us about your young friend?"

"Not much that's mine to tell," Gabriel says. "She's a good contact. I'm not burning her."

"Ah, well. No hope of recruiting her, I suppose? We don't quite have a full rainbow of brightly-coloured young people yet."

"She's one of Talon's free-er freelance agents," Gabriel confirms. "And she likes it that way."

"Ah, well," Ana says philosophically.

Privately-- and she will not tell Gabriel this, because he does not like to be fussed over-- she is relieved that he had some connection in the years he was in Talon's grip. She hopes that they don't have to come to blows with the girl in the future; none of them have so many friends that they can lose one easily.

"You like the kid," Jack says thoughtfully, perhaps thinking along the same lines as Ana.

"Retroactively, yeah. At the time, she was someone I could trust to be herself. Now, okay, all right, I like the kid."

"Will she be trouble?" Ana wonders.

"Oh, absolutely." Gabriel grins, catching himself before he can scare anyone.

Their conversation breaks as their coffees come; they fall into familiar, companionable silence. It has been so long since the three of them were hunched over caffeinated drinks together. She can almost smell the mix of scents that was breakfast in the old Overwatch mess room, fifty people from a dozen cultures jostling for one microwave or making due with whatever the cafeteria was serving.

If Gabe is remembering the same thing, he makes no indication of it. Then again, he is distracted; he has his hand twined with Jack's under the table. Jack has his face tipped toward him and even with his gaze hidden behind mirrored aviators, it's obvious that he's simply looking at Gabriel. He stares at the other man as if he'll fade away.

Gabriel doesn't stare at him in return, but he shifts closer an inch at a time, until he's leaning against Jack's shoulder. She doesn't mention it, although it's clear to her that by touch or sight, both of them need to be constantly aware of the other's presence. They used to be like this after close calls in the field, too. There is no reason to scold them; it fits nicely with the cover of being foreigners suffering the after-effects of a binge.

The two men have to break when the server comes back. The poor man is weighed down with a tray loaded with a heap of ham sandwiches, an entire orange bundt cake, a bowl of fruit, and Ana's comparatively petite smoothie. Ana sighs and mentally adds an extravagant tip to the mission’s already-large expenditures. Better to buy a little goodwill; they are most certainly being hunted by more than one girl with expensive technology and a pistol.

As they resettle over their food, Jack's chair scrapes across the cement patio, and Gabriel's posture adjusts slightly.  She doesn't look under the table; she doesn't have to, to know they've hooked their ankles like a couple of teenage boys on their first date.

She's not naive enough to think that Gabriel will be returning to the fold; she thinks probably the reverse, that in the long run Jack will sever his already tentative affiliation with Overwatch. That doesn't mean she won't savor this moment of being a team again.

A flash of purple gets her attention; so much for the moment.

"Your friend is here." Ana frowns at the figure dancing through the crowd. "She's different. Should we be worried?"

"In general, yes. At the moment... eh." Gabe holds up a hand and wavers it in the air.

"Sweet fuckin' nails, man," a girl at a nearby table slurs, and Gabe blows her a kiss off two jet-black, claw-tipped fingers. The boy next to her pretends to intercept it, and swoons.

"Hands to yourselves, idiotas, this one's mine!" the girl with the purple hair bounds over an empty chair between her and them, hurls a duffel bag at Jack without looking at him, and leaps onto Gabriel's shoulders. Gabriel twists out of his chair, lifting her, spinning her in a wide circle as the other diners duck out of the way indignantly. He’s laughing his deep dark laugh again, and the girl answers with a giggle.

Gabriel hooks an empty chair with his ankle, returning to the table with the chair in tow, swinging it toward the table and settling the girl into it with a dancer’s grace.

"Tuck in. I got you a fruit salad."

"Thank you, Gabi," the girl says sweetly, and promptly steals some of his cake and his cup of coffee.

Gabriel takes a slice of mango in recompense, growling mock-ferociously at her.

"You look like you're feeling better," Ana observes innocently. “Full of spirit.”

"Uh-uh," the girl says, through a mouth full of cake. Thankfully, she swallows before she elaborates: "No freebies, vieja. You want information, you pay."

"Another time, no doubt."

Gabriel reaches out stealthily for one of Jack's sandwiches. Jack catches his hand-- only to brush his lips across the knuckles and then let him take the sandwich.

The action isn't lost on their new friend.

"Guess you were friendlier with each other than all the newspapers said, huh, Strike Commander?"

"That's an inactive designation," Jack and Ana say in tandem. She's heard him say it often enough to match him tone for tone.

"We were engaged," Gabriel says, denying nothing.

"Shit, yeah? That's not in the files."

"We never got around to the paperwork," Jack says. He takes a huge bite of his own sandwich, washes it down with coffee.

"We were going to retire, remember?" Gabriel says fondly. "When Overwatch could stay on its feet without us. White picket fence in the suburbs and everything."

Something-- happens. Jack goes rigid, and then he is gone. His sandwich dangles in his paralyzed hand.

Gabe inhales, and Ana shakes her head sharply. "No. No, Gabriel, let him come back. He will come back."

She nearly loses her certainty. It takes nearly a full minute for the dissociative episode to end. She has seen this happen before, but it has never lasted so long. She cannot find it in her to be surprised-- as joyful a reunion as they are having, Gabriel's presence is surely the trigger for a thousand old memories, many as painful as they were happy.

Jack's chair jerks again as he stands, dropping his mangled sandwich.

"I'm going to do a perimeter check. Make sure your contact wasn't followed. We already know she's not a master of moving undetected."

"I'm a fucking ghost, pendejo!" the girl fumes. "Just not when I have sticks and rocks to work with!"

Jack ignores her, hunching his shoulders forward, falling into a believably hungover slump, wandering off like a drunkard taking some air.

Gabriel's face is distressed. His nails are lengthening, sharpening, growing up his fingers and displacing the skin of his first knuckle.

Ana kicks him under the table and he realizes what is happening, tucking his hands into his lap quickly.

"Don't worry about that old goat," the girl says derisively. "He always pulls through. Ask Los Muertos. Psht, maybe they never caught him napping like that, though. Wonder how much they'd pay to know--"

"Sombra." Gabriel's voice is suddenly half an octave lower, the scrape of a stone lid over a tomb.

She looks up at him, startled.

"No," he growls.

"...No?"

"He's mine." Gabriel's lips curl back from sharpening teeth. "If you send anyone after him, they're going through me."

The girl doesn't look particularly intimidated, but she does look offended. "...Okay, okay, Gabi. I was just wondering. Settle down."

"She's right. You're making a scene," Ana says quietly. "Try to remember you were Blackwatch."

He grumbles but complies, composing himself. His body starts to pull itself back to ground state, bit by bit. He runs a tongue over still-sharp teeth. "Shit. No poker games for me for a while."

"Oh, be a sport. Let Reinhardt win back some of the fortune he lost to you," Ana says mildly. "Eat your cake. Jack will return to us soon."

"Like I could shake him," Gabriel scoffs, but she catches him trying to find the soldier out of the corner of his eye

Ana demurely sips her smoothie, casting about for topics that are less fraught. She finally manages to get Gabriel talking about old poker games, and the girl Sombra is drawn in also, demanding to understand their inside jokes. Ana keeps them talking, and does a much better job of hiding that she is keeping her eye on Jack at all times.

It is ten minutes before their friend decides that they are safe and returns. The look on Jack’s face as he slouches toward them, weaving unsteadily around the other tables, tells her that they are in for the presence of the humourless Soldier. That will be delightful for everyone concerned. If Gabriel does not vanish at once, she will have to teach him to recognize the signs that Jack has stopped answering to anything but his call-sign.

The conversation goes on around Jack, now a bit stilted. The soldier does not reach out for Gabriel. When Gabriel drops his free hand under the table, however, in the vicinity of Jack’s knee, Jack lets out a little breath and his tight shoulders slacken just a little. He is not letting himself seek the connection he needs so badly, but when it is offered to him he accepts it. That is a good sign.

Ana notices this, too: as blunt, emotionless, and often monosyllabic as Jack has become, he still addresses the man next to him as 'Gabriel.' That one word is not as hollow as the rest.

It is a light shining through a crack in Jack's walls that she has not seen since before Zurich.

She prays that Gabriel stays. If Jack has a chance of finding himself again, it will be shoulder to shoulder with Gabriel. They were always unstoppable together... and at their weakest when driven apart.

* * *

  


Gabriel is starting to accept that his fondness for Sombra has passed ‘work friend’ and is dangerously close to ‘little sister’. That’s probably due to having years of interactions all collide in one four-lane multi-car pileup in his head, but that’s not something he can help.

That said, he trusts the little gremlin about as far as he can throw her. No, less than that, actually: she’s pretty light and he has a good arm. He makes sure that she’s actually out of sight before leading them back into the data dead-zone part of town, weaving in and out a few times just in case.

“Do you have a destination in mind?” Ana asks conversationally, as they pass the same intersection for the third time.

“Don’t get snotty, Amari,” he grumbles. “‘ I assume you two big heroes have a clubhouse to get back to. I’m just making sure that Sombra doesn’t invite herself along.”  It’s comfortable, being an asshole; makes him feel like his old self again. Ana doesn’t even mind; she seems as happy to fall into old routines as he is.

Jack, on the other hand.

Jack is on high-alert, hiding it behind his new sunglasses and a calculatedly easy posture, but Gabriel can read it. Jack is still mission-in-progress tense, there-might-be-a-line-of-bastions-around-any-corner-tense, the-UN-wants-him-at-another-surprise-meeting tense. He’s distant, not talking to them. His grip is too tight around the straps of Gabriel’s duffel bag.

It’s textbook hypervigilance, straight out of the SEP’s mental health management program. As if a textbook could have prepared them for any of it. Gabe can quote the support literature the army counselors gave him backward and forward, but he’s not sure if any of it can help Jack right now.

Gabriel realizes he hasn’t seen Jack actually smile today. He tried to this morning, when he woke up and found Gabe in his arms; it was tight and looked painful. Like he couldn’t handle being happy anymore.

Gabriel can sympathize with that. Doesn’t mean he likes seeing that look on Jack.

Ana is treating this shutdown like a normal thing, and he doesn’t like that, either. He’d always thought that the dull emptiness Jack showed when they bounced off each other as Soldier: 76 and Reaper was a reaction to running into an ex-lover who’d been transformed into a monster. That was perfectly understandable. The idea that Jack is like this a lot, though, almost all the time?

Fucking terrible.  

He slows a little, falling into step with Jack, letting his hand bounce off of Jack’s as they walk side by side.  Jack makes a fist, then tries to relax it.

Okay. Jack’s not in a state of mind where he can have both hands occupied and feel safe. Gabriel hooks a pinky through his belt-loop instead.

Jack leans into him a little, almost helplessly.

“Got your back, Morrison,” he soothes, his voice just a murmur. “Want me to carry that duffel?”

A sharp headshake.

“All yours, then, tough guy.”

Jack takes a breath and Gabriel just knows he’s going to apologize again.

“We have to come back here some time when we’re not on business,” Gabriel says, before Jack can say something stupid like ‘I’m sorry I’ve got PTSD from having a building falling on me and living for six years thinking my fiancee and all my friends were dead’. Or whatever thing he is blaming himself for-- and he does, god above, he does blame himself for it all. Always did.

“We’re about a decade overdue for a real vacation. We should just let the new kids fight each other while we drink overpriced cocktails on the beach.”

“One good thing about the bomb,” Jack says, and Gabe hangs on the words, because either he's going to say something nihilistic or he's joking. “All the leave-request paperwork probably burned.”

An actual joke. Gallows humor, but humor. The relief is palpable; Ana heard it too, he can see her posture ease a little.

“There are probably copies lying around,” Gabriel muses. “But we’d have to file them in an office that’s still under a half ton of concrete.”

“I bet the turnaround time is still the same. It couldn’t be worse..” Now both sides of Jack’s mouth are tilted up. A whole smile. And then Jack shudders, like the grim humor is catching up with him, and Gabriel leans into him.

“It’s good. Being with you again. It’s real good, Jackie.”

Jack wants to shake his head, it’s in the set of his jaw. Gabriel slips his hand from his belt up to the small of his back.

“There’s something wrong with me.”

“We’ll handle it. We’ve got time. You got us that. You got us all the time in the world.” He looks over at Jack, takes in the new scars and the white hair, sees nothing but the man he loves. Still a beautiful farm boy at the core. “They don’t own us anymore, the UN… Talon…”

“As if you ever answered to the UN,” Jack grunts, and his petulance is music to Gabriel’s ears.

“Okay, fine. Granted.” Despite his longsuffering tone, he smiles. He can feel it pulling across his whole body. It’s an actual effort to keep himself in the right shape. His body belongs to him now and its capabilities are completely in his control-- but his control’s shaky and his skin and scars want to mirror his too-big feelings.

“Love you to pieces, Jackie,” he says, rubbing Jack’s lower back. Jack makes a little hurt sound and bumps their shoulders together.

Hard to walk this close; they have to sway apart before they start stumbling into each other, but he takes Jack’s belt-loop again. They won’t drift too far apart.  

“Lovebirds, are you done?” Ana says with a theatrical sigh, holding up a tablet with a 2D streetmap on it. “I have our new rendezvous point.”

“Eat me, Amari.”

“Crude, Gabriel.” She gives him a tired, happy smile.

He missed these people. He missed them so hard it’s a physical pain in his newly not-empty chest. It can’t be the same as it was, but god, this will do, this is good.

Sooner or later he’s going to have to figure out what his new life looks like. He’s going to have to confront the ugly memories as well as the nice ones. He’s going to have to admit out loud to someone that there are a lot of things he’s done that he still doesn’t regret.  

Later, rather than sooner, maybe. It’s a precarious balance right now but he feels okay and it’s still so novel to feel okay.

Ana falls back, slings an arm around Jack from the other side; she tucks her thumb between the back of his belt and his waistband. Gabriel shifts his grip, and now they’ve both got Jack by the belt and their fingers are touching casually

Just this. They’re drawing closer to a reunion he’s sure he’s not ready for, but right now, he’s got this.

It’s good.

* * *

The peaceful walk ends at a shuttle bus stop; they approach as the bus does, and have the dubious privilege of piling in right away, along with a crowd of humanity. Standing room only, but Gabriel doesn’t mind an excuse to wrap back around Jack. A flock of American university students board and shove them into one another; Gabe steadies his posture and pushes back, a little, so Jack isn’t crushed.

Ana is pressed up against his arm. She leans up to whisper, “You know, you’re very unsettling, but I don’t mind this new body temperature.”

“...I hadn’t noticed I had one.”

“Not the chill of the grave, I’m sorry to tell you. But you are much cooler than I.”

“Could be inconvenient.” By which he means conspicuous.

“Mm.”

Even that much conversation is difficult in the crowd, and Gabriel doesn’t make an effort to extend it. Instead he counts Jack’s heartbeat against his own—his own is slow, coma slow, but not absent. Jack’s isn’t much faster, despite the strain on him. Tough old soldier.

Gabriel leans his head on Jack’s shoulder. The armpieces of his sunglasses digs into his temple, but it’s not enough of an inconvenience to move.

He actually feels Jack slowly relaxing—not all at once, and they all tense when the bus hits a rut and the rattles the riders together—but with his cheek against the muscles he feels the strain going out.

He sees signs for the airport coming closer and closer together as the bus leaves the city limits, but it’s near a private airfield that Ana half-climbs him to pull the cable that signals a stop. Some of the passengers are reluctant to shift apart and let them out. For a second. It’s amazing what a cold sharp pressure in the vicinity of your kidney can do; the crowd shifts to let them out, and they leave a trail of people shivering and checking their wallets.

Gabriel tucks his claws into the pockets of his sweats, hopping out of the bus and standing by while Jack helps Ana down like the little country gentleman he is.

Jack’s face is emoting again. Not too much, but look, a sardonic quirk of his mouth, the slightest twitch of his eyebrows. It feels like a victory.

He says “Gabe” in a chiding undertone, and Gabriel looks innocently at him. What? What did he do?

Jack sighs, put upon, but that twist of his mouth is threatening to bloom into an actual smile.

“Good to see you back,” Ana says, and pats Jack on the arm.

“Don’t start,” Jack mutters. He nods his head toward the control tower of the little airfield, and the big transport parked beside it. “Looks like they didn’t leave without us.”

Gabriel feels a little chill go down him at the sight; the good old MV-261, a massive troop carrier that’s honestly oversized for the number of the new Overwatch crew. It’s been a while since he’s been able to look at it without expecting someone to start shooting at him.

“Oh thank goodness. No jump jet,” Ana sighs, relieved. She taps her ear. “We are on approach, do you see us?”

A pause.

“No, he lost it. I know. He’s like a child, honestly.” She turns to Gabriel. “Winston won’t let you on without a complete security scan.”

“Oh, good. He’s not stupid.”

“Do you have a preference for who will be doing your patdown?”

“Give me one of my old crew. I know they’ll do it right.”

“Jesse or Genji,” she says, to whoever’s talking into her ear. “Hah, yes, that is what he said.”

As they head toward the Orca, Gabriel can see the main hatch open, ramp extended. There are a group of small figures waiting, and he starts to feel his skin crawl. The instinct is too deeply embedded, the threat assessment happens without his conscious control. _Metallic glints on two of them. Genji and his tin-can guru. Red slash visible from here, unmistakable cowboy hat. Dead-eye never misses. There’s Winston. He probably has some new technological fuckery since the last time they tangled; goddamn monkey’s always got a two-foot head start in their arms race. No metallic glints on the big one but still too big to be anyone but the German. Gleaming neon, glints on the legs, the musician. Pink, the MEKA pilot. Big shoulder rockets. Pharah. A huge crew, given their numbers. A huge threat._

Part of him is already plotting an attack, and the rest is trying to get out of high-alert and failing.

_A spray of shotgun pellets digging into the Soldier’s flesh and armor. Claws raking across a metal carapace, searching out power-lines and positronic connections. Athena choking as Sombra’s virus tries to strangle her. Burning fur, massive hands crushing his chest to smoke. A shock of electricity. Oxton’s chronal accelerator sparks and glitches, Fareeha falls, Jesse tumbles backward and only the impact of two raging blue spirits keeps the Reaper from sending a shotgun blast down after the cowboy to seal the deal-_

He splinters into smoke and tries to retreat, but there is a grip on him that keeps some of him solid, and he snaps back into Jacks’ grip. Jack’s hands are on his shoulders, the blue eyes alive with concern. His sunglasses are nowhere to be seen; neither are Gabe’s, he didn’t even feel the soldier take them off him--

“Gabe. Gabe, you have to breathe,” Jack is repeating. Gabriel gasps and tries to do so, but he’s out of practice with breathing in general and his body thinks it’s a good time to hyperventilate.

“They’re insane if they let me on that transport,” he says, more raspy breath than actual speech.

“They’re not insane. Many of them are your friends,” Ana soothes. “And you will be searched within an inch of your life when you get aboard. As you say, they are not fools.”

“They’ll understand you did what you were forced to,” Jack says.

“Do you understand how much I did of my own free will?” His voice crackles out deep. He feels the skin peeling back from bone around his mouth and eyes. It’s not painful. In some ways it’s safer, no nerves, no disguise-

Jack keeps his gaze unflinching.

“I’m going to. You’re going to tell me.” Almost a question. “Aren’t you?” Actually a question. “Tell me we’re past you keeping things from me for my own good.”

He gives a jerky nod.

“All right.” Jack nods in return. “That’s good enough for me.”

“For you.”

“If it’s not good enough for them, I won’t get on the damn carrier either.”

“Don’t be _insane_ ,” Gabriel hisses. “You just jumped so high up Talon’s hit list-“

“You’ll be on top as soon as they find out you’re alive, I’m not leaving you –”

“Stop,” Ana says wearily, putting a hand on both their shoulders. “Stop. I have already confirmed that you will be let aboard. They understand you are a risk, Gabriel. They understand. But neither of you are staying in Rio. Your choices are go aboard or go aboard unconscious.”

“Ana—,” he and Jack object simultaneously.

“And if for some reason you decide that you absolutely must not, then I am staying to watch over you. So take into account how badly I want to go home and sleep in my quarters.”

Gabriel stares at her as if she’s lost her mind.

“I’ve tried to murder _all of you_. Most of the time I even meant it.”

Ana shrugs. “I am sure the Bastion unit did also. Mean to kill, that is. We let it in.”

“That’s not—”

“And then there’s the older Shimada boy.”

“He’s not—”

“We’re not a clean house, Gabriel,” Jack says. “Just—come home until we figure out how to duck Talon, figure out where we’re going. You said you were with me.”

“Oh, Morrison, that’s _low._ ”

“Learned from the best.” Jack leans in to kiss his cheekbone. He can’t feel it, but he can hear the soft smack. The skin rushes over the spot, and he feels the next soft kiss.

“Finally learned to play dirty. Proud of you, boyscout.”

He’s got to figure out a better coping mechanism for his panic attacks than arguing with Jack and Ana. Hell, that was part of how things broke bad in the first place.

He focuses on the lingering warmth of Jack’s kiss and the hand locked around his and makes himself recite the serial number of his rifle from basic training and the code to his locker padlock from SEP until the bad old memories subside a little.

He’s got himself back together--literally and emotionally, with an unamused scowl on his lips and all his skin basically where it should be—when they get to the Orca.

Nobody looks quite as confused as they should.

“Nice to see you’ve finally made it back. Ana. Soldier,” Winston says, looking a little disapproving.

“Gabriel and Jack went through something of an ordeal. They needed to recover.”

“And then have breakfast. Without us,” Fareeha says, eyes narrow.

“You remember what fast metabolisms they have, dear.”

“Well, you’re here now.” Winston lifts one arm and waves them up the ramp. “Reyes, McCree will take you into the secure room.”

“I assume you have questions,” Gabriel says.

“Some. We’ve been provided a form of insight, though.”

“Athena received an encrypted video. I underscore pay underscore my underscore debts dot em pee gee four,” Jesse drawls. The repetition of the word ‘underscore’ is almost hypnotic, so it takes Gabriel a moment to get it, and to sigh. He’s going to get the little gremlin to take an actual gift one of these days, just to spite her.

“Saw some awful strange things. Doc O’Deorain made a cameo, all pissed off about losing one of her favorite science projects. Didn’t know she’d taken up with Talon, but I can’t say I’m surprised. I told you she was no good, jefe.”

His guts twist, the emotional turmoil threatening to come up again.

On the one hand… well, despite it all he still sort of likes Moira, the spiteful witch. And he means that euphemistically and literally. She has a very respectable dedication to her goals, a willingness to flout the rules. An expertise in necromancy the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in centuries.

On the other hand he’s been her guinea pig for seven years, had her hands combing through the very substance of his being and making little tweaks, and the thought of hearing her voice right now is almost enough to get him skeletal and hyperventilating again.

“Sounds like a viral hit. I’ll watch it. Later,” he grates out. His voice betrays him, goes deep and echoing and menacing.

“How do you do that with your voice?” Lúcio looks at him with actual curiosity mixed into his wariness.

“I honestly can’t tell you.”

“You mind if I sample you some time? I’d like to work up a filter like that.”

“Maybe. Later.”

There. Voice back to pre-death levels of gruffness.

“All right. Let’s go get you scanned ‘n probed,” Jesse says, crooking a finger.

“Looking forward to it. I want to see if you remembered anything I taught you.”

“Glad that ego of yours survived whatever happened to you,” the cowboy retorts.

Gabriel chooses silence over a snide comment back. He follows McCree up the ramp, and doesn’t look back. Even when there’s a chorus of gasps behind him.

“They say _princess_ ,” Luccio breathes. “You think they got those in shorts?”

“I have a mighty need,” Song agrees.

“Walk faster, McCree,” Gabriel rumbles.

The door of the secure room shutting behind him is a relief, really. It cuts the chatter from the rest of the team. It’s not a big room, floor space dominated by lockers full of various chemical and fire suppressants, a shower big enough for three SEP soldiers to fit in at once, one metal bench. It was meant as a chemical decontamination chamber, not as a brig or an interrogation room, but Gabriel knows how well it can serve the purpose. Everything is bolted to the floor or welded to the metal walls, there are no loose tools to serve as improvised weapons, and most importantly it can be sealed off airtight from the rest of the Orca. Jesse does that as they enter; Gabriel can hear the vents shutting and feel the slight change in the air pressure. No exits now, but that’s not a problem.

(Except that he’s separated from Jack, hyper-aware of it. It’s okay, he’s right outside. It’s okay, he’s fine. It’s fine, it’s fine, Jack’s right through that door--)

“Easy, Reyes,” Jesse says, peering at him from the side. He snaps a latex glove on. “Hell, always thought you had eyes in the back of your head, but I never thought I’d get to see ’em.”

Gabriel realizes that he shouldn’t be able to see the door when he’s standing with his back to it. He closes his eyes, and only opens the two that are supposed to be there. “You get assigned a pair when you hit ‘commander’.”

“Damn, I should’ve stuck with it, huh? Could’ve used an extra set of peepers.”

“Your own fault, Ingrate.”

Jesse snorts. “That it is.” He works a second latex glove carefully over his metal hand; the things are rated to stretch, but they tear if you look at them funny. Government-issue garbage.  

“…you know, you’ve been callin’ me that a while. Ingrate,” Jesse muses, almost to himself. “You really think it was ingratitude when I walked off? Before Blackwatch lost its last shred of respectability and became a Talon training ground? You really think I shoulda stuck it out? Or are you just physically incapable’a saying something nice about me?”

“Why not both?”

Jesse shrugs. Gestures at his t-shirt and sweats. “All right, strip and spread’em. You wanted the full Blackwatch treatment, you get it.”

“Attaboy.”

The sarcastic praise makes McCree’s mouth twist, something bitter pass over his face. Gabriel feels the stir of something unfamiliar and long buried. What’s this feeling, coming up to ambush him? Maybe… shame?

He shakes it off and strips quickly. Jesse keeps a perfect poker face when his scarred, dead-fish body is revealed, and honestly Gabriel’s grateful for his stoicism. He presses his palms to the wall where Jesse indicates, and tries to relax.

“You were right about O’Deorain. I shouldn’t have hired her,” he tells the metal cladding in front of him.

“…first time I’ve ever heard you admit you were wrong, and it’s while I’m fixing to check your body cavities?” Jesse asks in disbelief.

“What can I say? I’m feeling sentimental.”

“There’s something wrong in your head.” Jesse taps his jaw. Gabriel opens his mouth and Jesse sweeps two gloved fingers inside deep enough to make Gabriel gag, like he was taught.

No. Not quite like he was taught. This isn’t quite the full Blackwatch treatment. Jesse goes through the steps clinically, thoroughly, but he leaves Gabriel as much dignity as he can. He lets him keep his sense of humanity, doesn’t press any of the so-easily-accessible psychological buttons you can hit on someone who’s naked and at your mercy. And that’s not how Gabriel taught him to do it.

After the body search, Jesse takes off the gloves and takes out a portable bio-scanner. He stares at Gabriel’s shoulder as he dresses again, and there’s that dissonance, there’s that thing that makes Gabriel feel small. He would have chewed the cowboy out for just averting his eyes, but leave it to McCree to choose to keep tight surveillance with a minimum of humiliation.  Gabriel didn’t teach him that, either. He shuts his eyes and shudders. There are a lot of details that are clearer in hindsight, and he hates the picture they paint. He should have listened to the kid more often.

“You okay?” Jesse murmurs. He grips Gabriel’s arm securely and starts the scan.

“You were right,” he murmurs, feeling nauseous. If he throws up the first real food he’s had in more than five years he’s going to be pissed. If he cries in front of McCree, he’s just going to – hell, he doesn’t know. Not handle it well. “You were smart, leaving when you did.”

“Aw, jefe, you’re gonna make me blush.” The scanner beeps. “Well… I ain’t sure if you’re dead or alive, but you’re not smuggling weapons in, so you’re clear.”

Gabriel slumps onto the metal shower bench bolted into the floor. Jesse toggles the vents open, letting in a welcome puff of fresh air, and then sits down beside him.

“You’re in for a hell of a time,” Jesse says, more kindly than Gabriel thinks he can stand. “This next few weeks, it’s gonna be a roller coaster. Up, down, not knowin’ how you feel about years and years of your life. You probably already had a couple panic attacks, and they’re gonna keep coming. The stupidest damn things will set them off.”

“How did you do it, kid?”

“Let people help me. Took it slow.”

“No—,“ Gabriel clears his throat. “How did you—get it back?”

“Now thereby hangs a tale,” Jesse drawls. “But more or less the same as you, I think. Someone loved me a whole hell of a lot. And I loved him, it turns out.”

“Jack tackled me off a horse and punched me,” Gabriel grumbles.

“Yeah, I saw,” Jesse says, laughing quietly. “On that video we got sent.”

“Must be a longer cut than I saw.”

“Best-of stuff, I’m sure.” Jesse shrugs. “Well, in my case, Hanzo just kissed me. But I’m not near as stubborn as you are, so I reckon you needed a couple punches to get it across.”

Gabriel laughs. It only sounds a little like he’s crying. Hopefully.

“I was with your heart when it happened.”

“You were what, now?” Jesse says, going rigid next to him.

“Found out where Moira stashed it about a year ago. A few months after that I got the balls to go do something about it.”

“Yeah?”

“Ogundimu was consolidating power in Talon. I knew he’d want you. I figured you’d be better off.”

_A single revolver cartridge, gleaming with a power on a table, heavy caliber but still dwarfed by the shotgun aimed point blank at it._

“Better off dead,” he forces himself to go on. “But before I could pull the trigger, your heart just—exploded. It wasn’t like what happened to mine. It was a pure, golden light, like a sunburst. I – well, I wasn’t scared, I couldn’t be, but I would have been. About what had happened to you.  And I hoped. As much as I could.”

Jesse lets out a low whistle.

“Damn, that was a close call.” His voice is shaky. “That’s a terrible thing you almost did to me.”

Gabriel nods.

“…it was also a terrible kindness. I know you’da got in trouble if they found out.”

“I couldn’t let him have you.”

“Shit, boss, you’re gonna bring a cowboy to tears.”

“Like that's a challenge. I’ve seen you cry because the commissary was out of honeybuns.” His laugh wavers, chokes off.

A metal arm wraps around his shoulders.

“Lord. I’m so glad it turned out this way. We were gonna kill you.”

“What?” His turn to freeze in shock. His mind goes blank.

“Angie found a way to bring you down. We’d’ve had to destroy a piece of Jack to do it, and there’s not much of him left he can spare. But. Well. We thought you’d be better off dead.”

“I would have been,” he admits, though he’s still reeling. He’s more grateful for the supportive bulk of Jesse’s side and the weight of his arm than he’d ever admit out loud. “But Jack—”  

“It mighta killed him too, yeah. Not the curse, Angie found a way to contain that, but just seeing the end of you. He was a dead man walking already, that would’ve been the last nail in his coffin.”

“What happened to him?” Gabriel breathes. Rhetorical question. Ana told him enough. It’s not hard to understand. “God, my sunshine, Jesse, he doesn’t smile anymore. Not like he used to.”

“Been a long time,” Jesse says. “Well before Zurich happened. That weight was on top of him before I upped sticks. I don’t know how exactly it went sour between you two, but I hope to hell you take this chance to make it right.”

“I’d do anything for him.”

“Yeah, well… you did. You did a lot of things because you thought he needed ’em done and you didn’t want to bother him about the dirty little details. Maybe this time ask what he wants first.”

“I’m not taking relationship advice from you, whelp.”

“Oh, of course, far be it from me to criticize the healthy and adult relationship y’all had going on,” Jesse deadpans, and Gabriel barks out a painful laugh.

“I’m going to need you in on this, McCree. I’m too fucked up to be all he has.”

“We’ve all been here the whole time, arms out to pull him up. He made the choice to dig in deeper,” Jesse says, and if it’s cruel Gabriel knows he doesn’t mean to be. It’s an assessment of the situation, and it’s probably accurate. Dammit.

“I tell you what, though,” Jesse concludes, thumping him on the shoulder. “The man who walked up just now holding your hand looked more like good old poster-boy Jack Morrison than he has in ten years, easy. Maybe now he’ll give salvation a chance, just on your say so. And we’ll put our backs right behind him if he does.”

Gabriel lets out a long breath.

“Thanks.”

“Got your back, boss, as long as you fly right.” Jesse stands, pushing himself up off of Gabe’s shoulder. There’s the creak of leather and the faint jingle of spurs as he stretches out, and then he’s holding out a hand. “C’mon, now. Winston’s probably done scanning that bag of yours, and I bet it’s got your Halloween costume in it. You’ll feel better once ya look like a death metal album cover again.”

“I don’t know. I’m really coming around to these pants.”

Jesse laughs, a big unrestrained guffaw this time. Gabe hasn’t heard that in—so long. So long. It rolls over him like a warm wind. The sound is the color of Jesse’s heart.

“Missed you, kid.” Fuck. Fuck, fuck. He tries to make the skin pull away from his eyes again because at least then he won’t have tear ducts. His body doesn’t listen; it spills lacrima over his cheeks. He leans hard into Jesse, butting him with his shoulder.

“Missed you, viejito.” Well, at least McCree sounds a little misty, too. Goddammit. He leans into the younger man.

They walk out of the secure room together, arms over each other’s shoulders.

* * *

When he comes out, those of the team that don’t know him want to meet him, and those who do want a reunion. Including Reinhardt, migraine-inducing cheer and all.

“I hate you,” Gabriel says, as if it’s a new discovery. “I’d forgotten just how fucking irritating you were.”

Reinhardt just laughs. “Ah, Commander. Now I can be sure that you are no _Wichselkind_. No changeling could imitate that sulking.”

“It’s comforting,” Ana agrees, hovering nearby.

“You have to stop staring around like a lost deer, though,” Genji opines. “You will only truly be yourself when you scowl around as if you have found the whole world wanting.”

“And when someone fucks up real good, the slow clap,” Jesse reminisces. His arm is still around Gabe’s shoulder.

“The slow clap! McCree, I had nearly forgotten. It was sarcasm so pure it could kill.”

“Get fucked, Shimada.”

His eyes slip away from Genji even as he says it, seek out Jack sitting over on the couches with Winston. They’re watching something-- probably the video compilation Sombra provided. Jack hasn’t put his visor back on yet. The thing was pretty badly damaged, might not be working.

Jack looks up, catches his eye, and gives him a smile. It’s a shadow of a specific smug smile Jack only used for him, whenever Gabe accidentally wound up in a social situation and forgot to look like he hated it.

Gabe gives him a fractional chin-nod back, and fixes on his appropriate judgmental scowl again.

Jack gives him a thumbs up. Winston stares at Jack as if he’s just grown another head.

“There it is!” Genji crows, reminding Gabe not to just stare at Jack stupidly. “Hana, Lúcio, come here. See a master at work. The lines of this scowl were perfected by years of training and meditation-”

He meets the new kids. From Lúcio he finds out how Overwatch tracked Talon to Rio, and how they’d been double-crossed by Vishkar, which leaves him with quite a few questions.

Which are quickly answered when Lúcio adds, frustrated—“And this Vaswani chick, she has proof it was some random underling who set the whole thing up. Korpal walks out clean.”

“Of course he does.” Gabriel looks around at a circle of puzzled faces. … They honestly don’t know. Huh.

“Sanjay Korpal is in the inner circle of Talon.” The name just comes out, and he blinks. Korpal had been one of the most paranoid council members, had bound him against speaking his name. It must have been a binding on his heart, because the geas is just gone now—and he’d been able to say O’Deorain earlier, he hadn’t even thought about what that meant. No more bindings on his voice.

It’s a small, unexpected delight.

“You’re fucking with me,” Lúcio says, leaning back a little.

“I’m not. Sanjay Korpal sits on the council next to Ogundimu and Moira O’Deorain.” There’s a rush of petty satisfaction at saying it, just because they told him not to, just because he can. He gives in to the impulse to cackle, just a little, smoke curling off of him and rejoining with him in smug little tendrils.

“Creepy,” Hana observes, watching him warily from behind Genji.

“It is to be expected,” Genji says. “He loved Halloween best of all.”

“Whatever,” Lúcio says, waving at both of them to shut up. “You’re not fucking with me?”

“Is this some ‘if I say it three times it has to be true’ thing? I don’t think I’m that kind of magic. I’m not fucking with you. I almost wish I could see how it goes down when Ogundimu finds out Korpal let this half-baked plot happen right under his nose, it’s going to be a glorious dressing down.”

“Shit. You got any proof?”

He thinks about that, shakes his head. “Eyewitness statements from terrorist bogeymen don’t hold much weight in court.”

“Huh.” The musician lets out a breath. “…now I kinda feel bad for Vaswani. Don’t get me wrong, I hate her, but I don’t hate her that much.”

“Think she’d listen if we tried to tell her?” Hana asks.

“You’re joking, right?” Lúcio scoffs.

“We owe her at least the information. She can choose to believe it or not,” Genji says. “We should not antagonize her. She has proven a valuable contact. As one who works closely with Korpal, now we know she is even more valuable.”

That’s his old covert ops officer, thinking with his neon-colored head. Gabe’s scowl breaks just a little. He can’t help it.

McCree and Shimada were the two of his soldiers he’d been most furious at, before Switzerland went down. They’d had such promise, he’d trained them personally, and they just walked away from it? For a life of low-level bounty hunting and a robot cult in Nepal?

In hindsight, he’s proud of them. They’d learned enough to know that something was rotten. The students had gotten smarter than the teacher, gotten out while the getting was good.

Something good managed to escape the rot that ate his organization. Several good things. That’s something he can hold onto.

Jack and Winston join them after a while, after the kids get bored and drift away to start a basketball game with the omnic. Jack tugs him aside, and he slides into the other man’s personal space like a cat.

“We’re heading up to debrief in a minute. You coming?” Jack asks. It’s completely conversational, but in their close little huddle it’s also strangely intimate. It’s right. This is how he and Jack were, in the old days—always in each other’s pockets. Gabe leans in a little closer, savoring it.

“As much as you know I love a debriefing…”

Jack snorts. It’s just a little puff of air but it’s a laugh for Gabriel.

“How was the video?”

“Thorough. Kid’s good. Gave us a lot of the aftermath. Phone calls. Recorded conversations on the topic.”

“Conclusions?”

“They’re mostly sure you’re dead, they’re not sure if I am. If I’m not, they intend to fix that.”

“Of course. And… uh.” Deep breath. “Moira. What did she say.”

Did she threaten. Did she mourn. Did she rant. Did she say any of the strange, possessive things she used to say when he was under her scalpel or in the thrall of her magic that she meant fondly but would have scared the shit out of him if he were capable of feeling fear.

“Nothing much actionable.”

“Is she going to try to find my remains? Does she have anything left that she can use to hunt me? Track me?”

Jack closes the last distance between them, bumping his forehead gently. “Didn’t seem like it. I can transcribe it, if you think reading it would be easier. Or summarize the broad strokes.”

“The broad strokes of a ranting Irishwoman?”

“Sure. Easy. Blah blah, how dare Jack Morrison, I want his head – ‘for he’s taen awa the bonniest knight in all my companie’.”

“What?”

“‘But had I kend, Tam Lin, what now this night I see,” Jack murmurs. He’s quoting something, so Gabriel’s just going to wait until he’s done being Scottish and starts talking sense. “‘I wad hae taen out thy twa grey een, and put in twa een o tree.’"

Mm, on second thought, Jack can murmur nonsense into his ear the whole flight home if he wants to. But it seems like he’s done, just as Gabe was getting to like it.

“So does that actually mean anything?”

“Ignore me. I think I’m funny.”

“You’re never earning that comedy merit badge for your sash, stop trying.” He leans in and presses a kiss to the corner of Jack’s mouth. Because he can. “Go debrief. You need my insight, you know where to find me.”

“Won’t take long,” Jack promises, giving him a look that makes him wish there was a little privacy in the Orca.  Hell, not even for anything X-rated, he just wants to kiss his boyscout like a lovestruck teenager.

He watches him go, and then, not really wanting to chat with anyone, he tucks into a corner with a video display and tries to figure out what Jack was talking about.

He finds it quickly. ‘Tam Lin.’ It’s an old ballad, written in archaic languages, taken in some circles as a ‘how to’ for rescuing those stolen by the fairies. Several different versions, nobody can seem to agree on the symbology—that’s par for the course with old spells and songs in any culture—but some of the details remain version to version.

The white horse. The knight taken by the fae. The knight transforming in his lover’s arms. And – oh.

* * *

 

Jack and Winston look up from the holographic display above the briefing room table when he barges.

“Will you be joining us, Reyes?” Winston says, warily hospitable.

Gabriel doesn’t look at him. He looks at Jack, opens his mouth, tries to assemble his words, fails, and just comes out with “’Alas dear Janet, I think you go with child?!’” in a tone halfway between accusation and dismay.

“I… beg your pardon?” Winston says. Jack looks bemused for a second, and then starts nodding understandingly.

“The human lover is pregnant in every version, Jack!”

“Well, I thought we were both a little old for that to be a concern.” Jack frowns, face serious. “But you’re right, neither of us have ever completely understood what the enhancements did to us. I shouldn’t assume. I’ll have Mercy test me as soon as we get back to Gibraltar.”

Gabriel and Winston both stare at him, one in horror, one in bewilderment and growing concern.

“Heh.” Jack’s serious expression breaks. “We haven’t had sex in years, dumbass, I’m not pregnant.”

“What?” Winston gawks, even as Gabriel collapses.

“You shithead. You troll. I’m such an idiot.”

“Love you, idiot.”

“I’m going to crawl into a broom closet and never speak to anyone again, don’t mind me-“

Winston clears his throat. “I—sympathize with the urge. However, since you’re here, it really would be best to talk with you both about the near future. If we can all agree that the last few minutes didn’t happen.”

“Done,” Gabriel vows fervently.

“No deal.” Jack says, leaning back. “I’m taking the expression on your faces to the grave.”

“You are the worst, Morrison,” Gabe hisses, which means _look at you, you’re smiling, you haven’t pulled something like that since before they put up the damn statue, I love you._

“This is going to take some getting used to,” Winston sighs. “Gentlemen, if you could act like professionals? Just for a few minutes?”

“Sure.” Gabriel drops into the seat next to Jack. Jack hooks his ankle around Gabriel’s; Gabriel kicks him.

“You’ve put us in an interesting position, Soldier,” Winston says, deliberately ignoring the horseplay. “The world currently thinks that the Reaper has been destroyed. I’m sure it’s not only Talon that’s taken notice.  If and when he reappears, it’s going to cause an unavoidable stir.”

“I’m not going to hide in the watchpoint until the head counsel of Talon dies from old age,” Gabriel grunts.  “There’s omnics on that council. I’d be there for a long time.”

“That’s not quite what I was going for,” Winston says. “No, my concerns are twofold. First, when you re-emerge, Talon is undoubtedly going to try to re-acquire you.”

“Over my dead body,” Jack says.

“Yes, that will be their agenda,” Winston points out. “Secondly, you will be an unknown. All Talon will know is that you have slipped their control, and other parties won’t even know that. You will undoubtedly be considered a threat by the UN, by any corporation you’ve previously threatened. They’ll assume that you’re a lich, or worse. You will have more than one target on your back.”

“I can use that, though,” Gabriel muses. “Draw some fire where it needs to go. Play the insane ghost. Overwatch will catch a little flack for ‘freeing’ me, but in the end, you won’t be on the hook for my actions…”

“You want to be a one-man Blackwatch again?” Jack says. “Gabe, no.”

“Gabe yes. I’ve got a list. Don’t tell me you don’t. And Overwatch is going to need the occasional… rogue action.”

“Absolutely not,” Winston says firmly.

“It doesn’t even have to be assassination. You have no idea how effective fear is. When you scatter the roaches, they run to their holes. Set a fire, people reach for what’s most important than them. I can feed you so much information-“

“Wait.” Jack frowns at nothing. “You used to do that. Create a crisis so you could act in the chaos. Never told me about it, but I sure as hell found out after.”

Gabriel sees the moment of realization.

“Zurich was an op.”

“It was supposed to be.” He feels himself hunching in protectively, as if the ceiling’s going to come down on him again. “I didn’t – Jack, I didn’t set a bomb. I planted a device that looked like a bomb, I just wanted the threat to go out, I needed to scare out the profiteers and turncoats. I didn’t know until the first blast-“

“They framed you. Someone in Blackwatch knew and they framed you.”

Gabriel grits his teeth and nods.

“We should compare lists,” Jack says.

“Don’t say things like that in front of me, for God’s sake,” Winston says. “Soldier, you were bad enough before, if you’re going to strike out and form a hit squad-“

“No. No, that’s not Jack’s strong suit. That’s what _I_ do,” Gabriel objects.

“And it got you killed, I’m not letting you go off alone again,” Jack counters.

“I’m not letting either of you go anywhere if you can’t act rationally.”

“As if you could stop me, _monkey_ -” But Gabriel stops himself, because his voice is dipping back into the grave and Jack’s face is closing off. Jack needs him to stop himself. His golden boy is still alive under there, his corn-fed smartass brave soldier, but their fighting will bury him again as sure as the rubble did.

The rage is so tempting. Pure, like fire. It’s not more tempting than Jack, though. Never again, he’s never letting the mission outweigh Jack again.

He holds up a hand as an apology. It’s gone razor-edged and almost chitinous, so the gesture loses some of its pacifying intent. Oops.

“...Sorry. I’m not particularly stable right now. We should… talk with Ana. Shimada and McCree. The old crew, let everyone come.” Too bitter. Dial back. “There’s probably a compromise between my way and… you guys’ cute Disney Kids way. We’ll need to think about it. Both of us.”

Jack lets out a breath and reaches out for him. Gabriel flexes his fingers until they lose their edge, if not the sharp nails and black tint, and then takes Jack’s hand.

“I’m glad you agree,” Winston says. “In the short term, can we agree that you’ll keep a low profile at Watchpoint: Gibraltar for at least two weeks, while we assess the immediate threats?”

Jack nods. Gabriel follows suit.

“Wonderful. Please go be someone else’s problem now.”

“Antarctica’s nice this time of year,” Jack says tiredly. Winston gives an amused little huff. Gabriel will ask about that later. Not now.

They leave, find a card game in progress on the lower deck. Gabriel lets himself get invited in with only lip-service protest, and Jack wedges in beside him to watch and kibitz. They’re both aware of the edge they’re walking on. At least it’s familiar; they can feel their way along it from experience.

Unspoken between them is the renewed resolution: they’re not going to make the same mistake twice. Not going to turn on each other over policy. Never again.

* * *

That night they walk together exhausted into Jack’s quarters in Watchpoint: Gibraltar. They look around.

“No,” Gabriel says, immediately.

“Nope,” Jack agrees.

The standard-issue room is a minefield of their past that neither of them has the strength to navigate tonight.

“Roof?”

“Roof.”

They gather pillows, blankets, and Jack’s camping gear as quickly as they can, and trudge up the steps to the roof access point. The sheltered little nook between the HVAC shed and the water tank where recruits used to hide out and smoke weed is blessedly unoccupied; they make camp there, stringing up a tarp against a possibility of rain.

It’s not warm—Gabriel knows that, it’s even cool to him—but they’ve camped in worse. And Jack is still a furnace of a man.

“It’s good we’re up here,” Jack says, after a companionable bit of blanket-wrapped silence. “I need to, uh. Show you something.”

He pulls out a little holo-display, a dumb little movie player with no wireless.

“Do you have Evil Dead on that thing?”

“Hah. I have all your old garbage.” Jack’s smile doesn’t last long. “I have this, too.”

He pulls up a familiar display, a directory full of sub-directories, and spins the display with a finger so that one opens. It’s a graphical index of all the files under it, arranged in a 3-D web. It looks a little like a conspiracy theorist’s wall, which… it is, to be honest.

“That’s mine,” Gabriel breathes.

“You gave it to me. Months. Before Switzerland. I promised myself I’d get around to looking at it,” Jack says haltingly. “I told myself I was too busy. I don’t know anymore. A lot of things I told myself then, I don’t trust.”

He slowly rotates the display, the connections that Gabriel had found, bright nodes labeled Omnicorp, Helix, NATO, UN, NOAA, Vishkar, Null Sector, the EU, and a handful of other security corporations and banks and weapons providers. Those branch out to slightly dimmer sub-nodes with the names of people who had a say in, or some influence over the old Overwatch organization. All their ties to each other are depicted as little glittering lines, all the ways they stood to profit if Overwatch was out of the way.

It’s the prototype of the list that lives in Gabriel’s head now. The rot eating the house that the two of them built together.

“After you were gone, I didn't even have your tags. They couldn't find your body. Didn't have anything to bury. Had this. And I looked at it. I was too late. I should have listened to you, Gabe,” Jack groans. “You knew something was up. Knowing you might have survived if I just listened-”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t see the whole picture either. I was too proud. I thought Blackwatch was clean, independent.” He scoffs, and reaches up to draw new lines with his finger. Suddenly distant subnodes are connected with only one or two degrees of separation; suddenly the inevitability of the collapse is so much clearer.

“They set us up to fail, Jack. Overwatch was never supposed to work.”

“It feels too much like an excuse to let myself believe it.”

“An excuse,” Gabriel scoffs. “Jackie. Baby. We had all of this against us and we kept that ship afloat for twenty years. It must have given them aneurysms trying to figure out how to bring us down. They must have been kicking themselves for giving you that command, thinking you'd be easier to keep a leash on than me. We made it _twenty years_.”

“We wouldn’t have made it five without you.”

“We might have made it twenty-five, if I didn’t have my head up my own ass.”

They lean together, looking at the display; it stands in for the stars obscured by the tarp and the gathering clouds.

Some of the names are struck out in red. “You kept track of my hits, Jack.” Gabriel shouldn’t be touched that Jack kept the file up to date while he was assassinating people as the Reaper. (He is.)

“Mine are blue.”

Gabriel immediately hunts them out, recognizes a politician brought down for corruption, a CEO still in prison for insider trading, a gun runner here, a gang leader there, all now in jail. But there’s one—

“That guy died in a car bomb,” he says. “Ed McNamara. A local gang did it.”

Jack’s grip tightens a little.

“I… couldn’t get proof of anything. Nothing I tried worked, I couldn’t tie him to the guns he was supplying Los Muertos.”

“It was you?” The blue strikethrough seems to take on a slightly more menacing glow. He knows Jack isn't an innocent. They've seen combat together, their hands are drenched in the same blood. But Jack’s a soldier. It's in his callsign. He doesn't move in the shadows, he doesn't assassinate. “You don’t do that, Jack, you play by the book. I do the wetwork.”

“You were gone,” is all Jack says, but there’s a world of guilt and confession in those three words.

Gabriel reaches out with his free hand and decisively shoves the whole display back into the little projector, closing the files and taking it back to the top level menu.

“Winston’s right. We can’t do this the old way.”

_You should never have been in a place where you had to do that. I was supposed to carry that weight for you, cross the lines that needed crossed._

_…and maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought at knowing which lines those were._

“I still want to bring them down,” Jack says.

“Oh, me too. Burn it down. Salt the earth,” Gabriel agrees readily. “But… we could use some oversight.”

“Like who?”

“Like the gorilla, and the cowboy. Like Tor. Like _Ana._ ”

“Think we can trust them?”

“Maybe we have to.”

They fall into silence again. Gabe picks up the holo-projector and starts fiddling with it, flicking to the movie directory.

“Hey, you got a file of the original Critters? They never converted that to digital, and finding discs of it is like finding gold.”

“Found it in a thrift store a few hours outside of Dorado. Remembered you had a hard-on for it. It’s that actor you like, isn’t it?”

“My thing for Terrence Mann was formative, boyscout. Gave me a thing for Midwesterners with good bone structure.” Keep it light, keep it teasing, don't shake apart into angry smoke because even after it all went down in flames Jack bought a creature-feature DVD he'd never watch just because it reminded him of Gabe.

“Should I be jealous?”

“Babe, he was born in the mid-twentieth century. He’s dead,” Gabe answers the teasing solemnly.

“That’s not reassuring, considering the source.”

“Shut up.” He can feel his face tearing open again, too much smile in him to contain. He hides it against Jack's neck and kisses him with sharpened teeth. Jack shudders, not in a bad way, and turns into it. His kiss is still stiff, but need is flickering through the cracks in him, and Gabriel's less-than-cooperative skin doesn't slow him for a second. They have to break eventually; it's cold, the roof's too hard for this to go further. Later, though. Jack's last kiss on the corner of his mouth-- almost at his ear-- promises later.

Gabriel cues up the flick and they bed down, snuggled up tight in a pair of zipped-together sleeping bags. Gabriel’s skin is already warmer everywhere Jack touches; he may not be a source of heat anymore, but he’s determined to be a decent insulator.

They fall asleep halfway through the film, like the tired old men they are. The projector stays on a waiting screen for a little while after the movie ends—and then it too goes to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is Jack trans? Is this just a world where divine/magical pregnancy is common enough to factor in? Both? Entirely up to you. 
> 
> As always, this chapter made possible by the careful beta-ing of Fakkin_Drongo, who has saved you from more run-on sentences than you know. 
> 
> Stay tuned for the epilogue, 'Saving the heartless Man'


	4. Saving a heartless Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the slow recovery of Jack Morrison's heart is overseen by Hanzo Shimada, Lena Oxton, and mostly Jack's faithful bodyhorror boyfriend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: PTSD, panic attack, dissociation. Reaper flavored body-horror. 
> 
> Jack's a pervy monster-fucker.

All of Watchpoint: Gibraltar is aware of the Reaper’s destruction and transformation before the Rio team arrives home; they all have seen the video of a heart destroyed, heard the recordings of the baffled and enraged Talon scientists.

Hanzo steels himself. The coming days will be… complicated. He has faced the Reaper in combat many times, and does not delude himself that it will be easy not to be on his guard. He knows what was done to Gabriel Reyes. He knows how many of their number once knew the man. He knows how little any of them understand what has happened to that man.

Jesse was made Heartless, but Reyes was made… other. Strung between life and death, a yūrei with the last key to its peaceful rest held in bondage. The Reaper was a vengeful ghost with no power to attack those who wronged it, turning its horror on innocents instead. It is not a thing Hanzo is comfortable with.

He knows that Jesse is glad-- has heard the broken joy in his voice-- that his old mentor is freed and returned to them. He knows that it will be hard for his cowboy, too, because Reyes’ presence will surely stir memories of old betrayal.

He knows…

He knows that he does not know what comes next. He must accept that the hundred questions he has can only be answered with time. He must watch carefully, and not act rashly based on his own fear and rage.

Despite these resolutions, his first meeting with Reyes-as-ally does not go particularly well. He is waiting in the hangar when the Orca returns, with Bastion an oddly reassuring presence by his side and Torbjorn scowling nearby. The hatch opens and the Rio team comes out as a swarm, not in the usual quickly dissipating trickle.

There is a black clad figure in their midst. It comes unarmed, without the bands of shotgun ammunition that usually decorate it, with its cowl down and its mask absent, but it is still familiar enough to set Hanzo’s nerves thrumming.

The Rio team surrounds the Reaper -- Reyes-- and Hanzo does not know if they are acting as bodyguards or prison guards.

Jesse and Genji break from the group first.

“Brother,” Genji greets him warmly. His voice still echoes the strain of the prior night, when he admitted on private channel to Hanzo that the apparent loss of Soldier: 76 and the Reaper had stirred up unpleasant memories.

Hanzo does not know why his brother chose to tell him, and not his mentor, that he had suddenly remembered hearing about the first deaths of Morrison and Reyes. The news had come late to him, and Genji had felt instead of loss a troubling absence, the mild social inconvenience of learning some opportunity had passed him by, or some distant acquaintance had been struck by a car. That absence had haunted him long after.

Hanzo understands this numbness. He knows it from his own past, he knows it from Jesse’s whispered confessions. So he reaches out for his brother, stiffly, and embraces him around the metal shoulders as if they were boys again.

Genji keys his faceplate open, and leans his scarred forehead against Hanzo’s. He lets out a breath, and sags-- as they were when they were not boys, but young men, and Genji would come home drunk and dissatisfied, having sought freedom in vice once again and not quite obtained it. Then, Hanzo would both scold him and embrace him as he collapsed. Now, there is no scolding, only the strength of his body and all the comfort that is left to offer his brother.

“Reyes is himself once more. He is like the man I knew,” Genji murmurs. “Too much like the man I knew, at times, and then burning and burnt out by turns. But it is good he is back. He has endured much.”

“And you, brother? What have you endured?”

“Later.”

"Later, then."

“Over pastries?” Genji asks hopefully. 

“Yes,” Hanzo huffs a laugh. This moment of connection with his brother is infinitely fragile, infinitely precious. They are still finding their way back together after Hanzo’s betrayal, and it is never easy to relive these moments of their youth when the bloody period between union  and reunion lurks just behind and ready to be relived too.

“Thank you,” Genji says. “I did not think it would be so hard.”

“Worthwhile things often are,” he says pompously, sounding just like their father, because he wishes to hear Genji scoff under his breath at him. “I will be with you.”

Genji slowly takes his weight off of Hanzo, standing straighter, but retains the embrace another moment. He breaks as he is called to come carry supplies off the Orca, leaving Hanzo and returning to his master’s side.

Jesse has been waiting patiently for this reunion to end-- he hangs back to let Genji and Hanzo have their moment before he too comes to Hanzo’s arms.

“Jesus Christ, honeybee, I don’t know my head from my hind end right now,” is his own whispered prayer as he wraps himself around Hanzo and hides his face in Hanzo’s hair.

Hanzo basks in his warmth and strength, wills his own to Jesse in return. For a moment, they are all that exists in the busy hangar.

And then a half-familiar voice says: “Hanzo.”

Jesse stiffens in his arms.

“I beg your pardon?” Hanzo says between gritted teeth, not disguising how displeased he is to have their reunion interrupted.

Gabriel Reyes is not talking to him; his eyes, black-rimmed and blood-red, are fixed on Jesse.

“You said Hanzo. Back on the Orca.” His voice is not as deep, nor does it echo, but it is the Reaper's voice. Hanzo has to fight the instinct to assume a defensive position. 

“Sure did, Gabe.” Jesse pulls away reluctantly, leaving one arm twined around Hanzo’s back so that as he turns to face Reyes the two of them are still side-by-side, linked.

“This Hanzo.”

“No, one of the other Hanzos we got stashed away. Yeah, this Hanzo,” Jesse declares hotly.

“A fucking Shimada, kid?” Reyes says. His tone is not disgusted or angry. What it is is dubious enough to rile Hanzo’s pride. “Never figured out how he even got signed up. The way you and Genji talked about him, back in the day-”

Hanzo’s gaze flicks up. Jesse looks stricken. He does not need to know this, he tries to communicate wordlessly. He suspected that Jesse once had different feelings, while he still could have feelings. It means nothing now in the face of what they are.

“Things change. You know that better’n most, don’t you?” Jesse says defiantly.

Only now does Reyes seem aware of the lines he has crossed. He schools the judgement off of his face and holds out a bare, gray hand to Hanzo.

Hanzo takes it with princely dignity. It is cool when he shakes it. “It is a pleasure to meet you in a setting where you are not trying to shoot me or my team.”

“Lovely to meet you too, Shimada-san. When you’re not shoving a pair of spirit dragons down my throat.”

Reaper came very close to killing Jesse once. On that day Hanzo bit back a cry of fear and loosed the dragons instead of the sound. He feels his face settle into a cold scowl. “Indeed. I hope that in the future I will have no need to repeat the gesture.”

It is a threat. He does not do Reyes the discourtesy of pretending it is not. He holds the other man’s uncanny gaze until Reyes nods, accepting the warning.

“Little tight, lovebug,” Jesse whispers, and Hanzo realizes that he is pulling Jesse against his side hard enough to leave fingerprint bruises on his ribs.

Reyes looks between them, looks to Jesse-- and there is uncertainty on that corpse-pallid face for a moment, a question in the red eyes. Reyes worries he has offended Jesse. Jesse gives him half a smile, and then Hanzo sees perhaps the most human emotion Reyes has displayed yet; relief.

The man knows that he is fallible. He truly wishes to reconcile with Jesse, not throw their old relationship away at the first struggle. Good. Hanzo will make every attempt to let him do so, and not provoke him more than necessary.

If those shotguns turn on Jesse again, however, Hanzo will be merciless.

They stand in a tense conversational stalemate for a moment, rescued by the appearance of Soldier: 76. The soldier is maskless, an occurrence so rare as to be commemorated on the calendar.

“If you’re done making a good impression, Angela wants to run you through some tests.”

“Of course she does,” Reyes grumbles, rolling his eyes.

Hanzo gives Jesse a startled look, and Jesse nods to confirm that he heard right. 76 never refers to Doctor Ziegler by anything but her callsign-- nor anyone, in fact-- only it seems now that he does. He also suddenly wields sarcasm less like a sharp instrument and more like affection, unprecedented in Hanzo’s experience with the man.

It appears that Hanzo’s intelligence was incomplete.  More than one extraordinary transformation took place in Rio yesterday.

The two older men leave them. Hanzo watches them go and Jesse lets out a long breath. Hanzo releases his hold, not moving away but petting soothingly where his fingers dug in, apologetically smoothing out the bunches his grip made in Jesse’s shirt.

“Thanks, Han. That was-- that was real diplomatic, mostly. It coulda gone differently.”

He will accept the burden of that ‘mostly’. He did, after all, threaten the man. But perhaps it was not the worst first meeting.

“I am willing to extend some trust for your sake, Jesse. I believe Reyes is likewise.”

“I hope so. I missed him something powerful this past few months, but Lord, I forgot what a jackass he can be.”

Hanzo chuckles. “This is not a team of delicate sensibilities. If he can master the worst of himself, he will fit right in.”

“You think so?” The pleading note in Jesse’s voice is surprising.

“We will make it so,” Hanzo says, and leans up for the welcome-back kiss they have not yet shared.

 

* * *

 

When Lena runs into Reyes and Morrison, it’s after the tests are done. It goes a bit better.

She hasn’t been staking out the medbay as such, it’s just-- well. Despite having heard what she feels is wonderful news, she needs to see for herself. Just needs to be sure, all right, that Morrison is actually safe. That Reyes is actually back.

She didn’t know the man like she knew Winston and Commander Morrison and them. She’d trained with Genji a fair bit before he went off to join the Shambali, and after that, had been close enough with Jesse McCree when he wasn’t off on some hush-hush mission or other.

Reyes, though, he’d just been an occasional gruff voice on the comms and a gust of cold air that heralded an oncoming fight with Commander Morrison. She’d mostly filed him away to her mental reference as ‘Genji and Jesse’s commander, bit of a grim bugger.’ So it’s not about missing the man, really, more about wanting to be reassured that they really are putting the pieces of Overwatch back together. Ana was a big piece, Morrison was a big piece… and like it or not, Reyes was just as much a part of what Overwatch is.

So she makes sure her errands just happen to take her along the medbay, is all. It’s on one long detour between the common-room and the kitchen that she sees the door opening and almost screeches to a halt, she decelerates her personal time so quickly.

“Hiya,” she chirps at the two men emerging.

She realizes that was a poor choice when Reyes takes a step back and his hands come up, shotguns half summoned but at least pointing at the ground. She lifts her own hands palm out, showing that she’s unarmed.

The hellfire shotguns boil away into smoke. Morrison reaches out and steadies Reyes, a hand on his black-coated shoulder, and the other man visibly settles himself.

“Sorry about that, gents. Didn’t think-- well, didn’t think, did I?” she asks wryly. “Welcome back, you two. Dreadfully nice to see you both among the living...”

“You remember Agent Lena Oxton,” Morrison says, tipping his head at her. Her jaw drops; she shuts it with a snap. ‘Agent Lena Oxton’. Lena and all. Can you Adam and Eve it, the man’s remembered she has an actual name.

“Mostly I remember small arms fire and ‘Cheers, love, the cavalry’s here,’” Reyes says in snide falsetto, giving her a particularly evil eye. But his hostile demeanor cracks a bit, and he gives her a nod. “You got this one-” He indicates Morrison by bumping him with his shoulder, “-off the fence about King’s Row. I remember you, Oxton.”

And then like stone cracking, Morrison gives the other man an actual smile. Oh, it’s no sunny grin, but it’s actual movement of the lips and a faint but distinct softening around the eyes. Forget getting Reyes’ heart back, that’s the real miracle she’s seeing just now.

Emboldened, she goes on: “Sorry you don’t like m’catch phrase, Commander Reyes. Only mum told me it was rude to run around the battlefield shouting about my sex life.”

Twin stares of incomprehension, one blue, one red.

“You know.” What’s food for the goose; she drops her voice as far into her chest as it will go and intones: “Death Comes.”

Morrison gives a little wheeze, as if she’s punched the poor man in the chest. Reyes’ glance snaps to him, and the sun dawns over his gray, scarred face as he sees the grizzled old Soldier give a painful grin. Morrison lets out another funny-sounding breath, and good lord, he’s laughing, has she ever heard it in her life? Certainly never outside old Overwatch news interviews. Sounds like quite the effort, oh dear.

Reyes’ laughter rolls in a moment later; it’s deep and a bit manic, a counterpoint to Morrison’s involuntary-sounding wheeze. Lena steps back a pace as he lets his amusement show in earnest; it’s an off-putting spectacle of smoke and torn flesh and far too many teeth-- though he does put one clawed hand over his widening mouth in an attempt to be demure.

“I _like_ her,” says the same voice that has occasionally commanded that she die, die, DIE. Reyes clears his throat and sounds more human a second later, though he’s still chuckling. “Sorry. Feelings get away from me.”

“No worries, mate, Jesse was the same, after.” Of course Jesse wasn’t quite such a ghostly terror about it, but he’d gone through that same adjustment period of everything catching him off guard. If it was funny, it was the funniest bloody thing; if it was sad it was tragic; if he was scared you could see him trying not to freeze with all the training in him.

Speaking of. Morrison’s breathing is less good humour and more distress, now, and she zips to the side of him not taken up by Reyes to shore him up.

Poor sod looks like he’s sprained something, trying to laugh so hard after years without practice at it, and his smile is gone again. She misses it already.

Reyes braces him on the other side, kisses his temple and murmurs something. The strain on Morrison’s face eases a little bit, and if he’s not smiling again at least he was able to stop before he tied himself up in that humourless cold ball he’d been for so long.

It wasn’t a miracle, then. But that’s all right, not all of them get miracles. She’d been in the armed forces long enough to know that. It’s hope, anyway. Hope’s good enough.

“Won’t keep you,” she says, zipping back to personal space distance now that Morrison’s not in distress. She’s suddenly conscious of the popcorn she promised she’d fetch for the folks in the common room and still hasn’t. “Just-- wanted to see things were all right. Glad you’re back. Both of you.”

“Thank you, Lena,” Morrison says, and extends a hand.  His brow furrows; she sees an apology trying to put itself in place, for the way he’d treated them all around the new year.

“Really is good to have you back, sir,” she says, putting a little extra weight into it. “Feels a bit more proper.”

“Aw, boyscout, she thinks you’re proper,” Reyes says, but there’s no malice in it. Not even a little.  Well done Reyes.

“Ta!” she says, and streaks back towards the kitchen, content that all's well.

A horrible weight’s been on her since they got briefed about the mission, and it’s finally off her shoulders.

 

* * *

 

Settling into the Watchpoint is deceptively easy. Gabriel feels himself getting a little stir crazy every now and then, but it’s still easy to distract himself with simple stimuli. And complex stimuli, like Jack.

With Talon regrouping from the disaster in Rio, and Korpal no doubt furiously cleaning house, there isn’t so much happening on the world stage that he feels bad about lazing around with his boyscout.

There's less sex than he might have imagined; he’s too sensitive and Jack is too anxious for them to do much but get off next to each other. Compared to seven years of numb celibacy, though, it’s still mindblowingly satisfying.

Hell, just the fact that Gabriel can still orgasm is a relief.

So every night he snuggles into the crook of Jack’s arm as he re-learns his body, or Jack clings to him with one arm while the other works furiously, and it’s frankly hedonistic. Then they watch shitty TV, and eat junk food; another thing that Gabriel can’t deny himself, now that he knows he has it back. That breakfast cake in Rio sealed the doom of his self control.

It turns out that shitty comfort food and sexual pleasure are things Jack apparently hasn’t weaned himself off of in the last few years, either.  He confesses-- like Gabriel's a priest-- about nights down a bottle or gorged on comfort food, wringing a few endorphins out of his body with his hand afterward. It's common ground, something not safe but not more full of traps than any other activity. It’s almost tempting to think that they can start with sex and pizza and slowly access the rest of the emotions Jack’s accidentally locked himself out of. Not realistic, but tempting.

They’re going to need more than that, though. Because though their return seems easy, the culmination of a fairy tale, there’s still hard reality lying under the surface for both of them.

Gabriel’s not sure he’s safe to be in combat with anyone else yet, for one. It’s hard to train or even spar safely when your weapons are soulbound to the fabric of your being; hell, he almost summoned a shotgun in the shower once, and it was panic about getting water in the mechanisms instead of rational thought that kept him from shooting the perfectly innocent cats that chose the wrong balcony to have an evening fight on.

And Jack… Jack has good days and bad days. It breaks Gabriel’s heart every time he realizes how much strain his lover’s been under. Finding out that the emotional shutdown had been Jack’s baseline, it was daunting. He’s helping-- he knows he’s helping, and Jack’s letting him help-- but it’s hard to know how far to push. Neither of them are sure of their limits, and they only find them by stomping over them.

There’s a day that starts like any other and goes bad fast; it’s early on, a few days after Rio, when Hana Song announces that she’s just got a tester copy of SmashBros Holoparty XV and everyone in the common room is going to play with her.

Jack tries to beg out, but the brat won’t let him; Gabriel keeps a straight face while the old shark adjusts his reading glasses and asks her to explain the controls to him.

D.Va may be all but unbeatable at shooters and MOBA games, but she’s admittedly not the most well-versed in brawl style games. She’s sure she’ll master it without a problem, though. After all, with Soldier: 76, resident fuddy-duddy luddite as her opponent, what could be easier?

In actual fact, when it comes to old-school rock-paper-scissors button mashing, she’s _decades_ behind Jack’s experience. He thrashes her handily, in front of a growing audience. By the end Gabe is just draped off his shoulder like a trophy date at a casino, cheering him on with every ring out.

“Okay, you win. You’re out of the tournament, you don’t ever have to play again,” Hana says, rolling her eyes. She’s visibly delighted by the whole thing, though.

The audience leaves chattering about it and poking gentle fun at Hana, and Gabe drops a kiss on Jack’s forehead and heads off to blast apart simulated enemies. Fifteen minutes later Athena interrupts him before he’s even really warmed up.

“You have an urgent message from Agent Song.”

“How urgent? I’m five minutes into a sim. Song thinks running out of popcorn is ‘urgent’.”

“You have an urgent message from Agent Song regarding Agent Morrison,” Athena clarifies, a little more forcefully than he remembers her being able to.

“End the simulation and put it through!”

Hana’s voice immediately fills the simulation room.

«Can you get up here? Morrison’s having an episode.»

“What? What kind? Give me the details, I’m moving. Athena move the conversation to-”

“Conversation transferred to private comm,” Athena says in his ear, and then it’s Hana again, laying out Jack’s symptoms.

«First he got cold and kind of snappy, but I’m used to that from him. It got worse, though, and now he’s just standing in the doorway, it’s either -- Athena, help me out?» Hana adds two phrases in Korean.

“‘Dissociation’ or ‘absent seizure,’” Athena translates, adding, “Agent Morrison does not have a history of seizures.”

Shit. Didn’t this happen in Rio? Gabriel remembers that he said something, but not what, and it drove Jack to a shutdown.

“Song, mute your game.”

«I turned it off, I’m not that inconsiderate,» she says, offended.

“Fine, good. Turn the TV on. Find something with a laugh track, or a goofy reality show. Cooking or clothes or obstacle courses or something. I’m almost there.”

«On it.»

He hip-checks the door into the narrow stairwell and then decides that legs are inconvenient, pouring his body up the space to the next landing as a cloud of smoke. He grits his teeth for a second at the disorientation as his body regains its shape, and then he’s out of the stairwell and booking it for the common room.

Jack looks through him, but he lets Gabriel pull him to a couch. Song watches to make sure he’s got it under control, then vacates the room.

“Want to watch some TV, gorgeous?” Gabe asks.

No response. He hopes this is right. They used to use TV as a buffer between conflict. Supposedly funny video compilations and people falling off of foam-padded obstacles mean a truce, a safe zone no matter how bad the tension outside.

He strokes his nails through Jack’s thinning hair, unable to pay attention to the TV when Jack’s stiff in his arms and looking into the middle distance. He’s starting to suspect he’s fucked up badly when Jack finally starts to relax into his arms and quiets down his doubts.

“Sorry.”

Of course it’s the first thing he says. It’s not just a bad habit, it’s just that Jack Morrison got a statue made of him and it pressed down on his chest like a couple tons of responsibility set in granite. He stopped thinking of himself first a long time ago. There’s his troops and there’s the mission and there’s Gabriel and in distant last is Jack Morrison comma the wellbeing of.

“Can you tell me about it?”

Jack shakes his head.

“All right.”

Ten minutes later, they’ve only moved enough to get comfortable. Jack’s got his head on a pillow in Gabriel’s lap. Gabriel’s rubbing his shoulder idly.

Jack reaches up to grasp his knee.

“...I ruined us,” he says, his voice raw. The TV blares a commercial for a new all-in-one cleaning gadget.

“We’re not talking about who’s to blame for the end. We agreed. We’re not going there right now.”

“After.”

Gabriel draws it out of him word by word. The problem is this: once upon a time, two men went to an arcade to play fighting games and forget that their lives were falling apart. They kept some arcade tokens.

Later, one of the men left a token in a bar in Lijiang to warn the second man that Talon was tightening surveillance and the bar was unsafe. The second man got the message, and threw the token away.

And now Jack can’t escape the certainty that he’s ceded his claim to the memory-- to their happiness, then and now-- by carelessly throwing away the old pieces of their lives. He left a piece of his own heart in China when he treated their past like a tool. And not just China-- they’d been communicating this way for years.

Gabriel remembers. He remembers burning their memories like fake IDs and using their love as a disposable cipher. He remembers that it hurt and he couldn’t recognize or understand the sensation, as clear as it is now in hindsight.

But those fragments of his life poured back into him all at once, painfully, molten metal searing his insides and filling in the holes in him. Those memories came back to him to be branded onto his soul with fire.

 _They didn’t for Jack._ And now he knows.  Suddenly he has an entire indexable list of triggers he needs to watch out for. In Rio, it was mentioning retirement. Today, video games. There’s an entire playlist of songs he’ll have to keep Jack safe from until they work this out, food they won’t be able to eat. Fine. He can work with a list.

“We can get those memories back. If you want them,” he promises, running his thumb down the divot that unhappiness draws on Jack’s forehead. “We’ll make new ones. You didn’t ruin us.”

“I don’t-- I threw us away. I don’t deserve it,” Jack repeats numbly.

He can’t argue Jack down from this. Jack doesn’t need logic right now; he’s in pain, he needs comfort.  Gabriel turns up the TV and starts a low commentary on the on-screen idiocy, keeping it up until Jack is completely present again.

There’s not really a graceful transition between his light color commentary and what he has to say next.

“...Jackie. Shimada’s been up my ass about talking to the stainless steel hippy. I’m thinking of taking him up on it.”

“‘Shimada?’ You remember there’s two of them, right?”

Jack knows who he means; he’s just being contrary. That’s a good sign.

“Shimada Classic,” Gabe clarifies, rolling his eyes.

“Wouldn’t that technically be the older brother?”

“The older one wasn’t in Blackwatch. Don’t be a dick, you know I mean Genji. Hanzo didn’t go join a bunch of robot flower-children in Nepal.”

“Not a ringing endorsement for someone you want to psychoanalyze us.”

“Us? What us? Who said anything about you?”

“I’m the one who had a shutdown over video games.” Jack rolls to his side so that he’s looking up at him from his lap. Those pretty blue eyes are a little bloodshot now, from blinking too little and staring too long. “You’re not subtle, Gabe. You brought this up because you want me to talk to Zenyatta.”

“Granted,” Gabriel sighs, pinching Jack’s ear lightly. “I’ll suck it up and get my head shrunk if you will.”

“Mmmph.”

“I’ll take that as a maybe.”

Jack’s nod is fractional, and belied by his words, which are: “Hush, this is my favorite commercial.”

“Hmph.” Gabriel draws a circle on his cheek, leaving a pattern of black that melts away to smoke almost as soon as it’s formed.

When Jesse wanders into the common room a little while later, they’ve gotten too comfortable to move and fallen prey to a marathon of some mindless competition show.

“Hey, is that laser chef? Shoot, I haven’t seen a whole episode in a dog’s age.” Jesse drops into a seat nearby, eyes studiously on the screen and not the two of them.

Hanzo appears not long after, as if he senses where Jesse is-- the man is bonded to two powerful spirits, he may actually sense where Jesse is-- and Reinhardt is let in on sufferance soon after, once he promises to keep it down. Then Ana finds her way in with Fareeha as the evening goes on. Slowly the common room fills again, and with Reinhardt as a shield and under Ana’s watchful eye, Jack falls asleep in Gabriel’s lap.

Hana pops in to poach a soda, and gives him a thumbs up.

The crisis is past. The perils of therapy are yet to come.

* * *

The first attempts at therapy go poorly.

It only takes one visit with Jack for Zenyatta to realize that no-one who has gone through the wringer of SEP can handle being told to ‘relax and push through the discomfort,’ or any variation on it. Breathing exercises are risky and being forced to sit still is a no go.

But.

All right, the Shimada kid knew what he was talking about. The Omnic isn’t stupid; he’s annoyingly serene and he pisses Gabriel off just by existing, but once he learns that Jack and Gabriel won’t respond to the same treatment that worked on Genji he gets creative.

It’s Zenyatta that makes one of their first major breakthroughs, and that is the discovery that neither of them has any particularly traumatic memories attached to the gym. The smell of stale sweat and the particular diluted disinfectant of a weight room are distinct enough from hospitals and med bays. The scent of wood polish on a basketball court actually triggers contentment for both old soldiers.

So therapy for them looks like brutal one-on-one basketball games with an unflappable robot opponent. It looks like metal hands in spotter’s position as Jack does bench presses. It sounds like a conversation. About Jack’s past. About Gabe’s future. It’s prying questions posed between rounds of augmented HORSE and answers given to the rhythm of bicep curls.

Gabe leaves every session absolutely full of loathing, and the worst part about it is that it’s helping.

Jack is slowly releasing his hold on his feelings, training himself back out of the instinct he carved so deeply that made him shut down emotions. Gabe is settling, able to cope with his triggers a little better, able to break himself out of the feedback cycle that intense emotions bring. Two weeks turns into three, and they don’t think of leaving Gibraltar, because nothing makes either of them feel safer than knowing Ana is in eyeshot. Morrison settles every time he sees Oxton’s blue trail in the air; the soft hum of Genji’s ventilation fans or the jingle of spurs puts Gabriel at ease because his two best are here.

And they begin to have more good days than bad.

* * *

There’s a day that starts bad, but gets good, which is a pleasant change.

It’s maybe a month and a half after Rio; Overwatch is still an unsanctioned bunch of vigilantes, but it’s got a lot of good will.

Katarina Volskaya wants to send them a representative.

Gabriel thinks it’s a great idea.

Jack thinks it’s a horrible idea.

Despite their best efforts, they slip into the old rut-- the same argument, the same recrimination, both of them picking at old wounds, both of them wanting to stop, neither knowing how. They’re in the meeting room long after the morning’s briefing has run out, arguing about the proposed new agent.

“We need the manpower. We need political legitimacy. You of all people know that.” Gabriel is standing, palms on the table. He’s enveloped in a cloud of seething black smoke, as if his resentment has taken a visible form.

“I know that Volskaya is attached to a laundry list of human and omnic rights violations, and I don’t want her anywhere near this,” Jack snaps, ramrod straight in his chair.

“She’s Russian, what do you expect? But that’s a good thing. Dirty laundry means a way to check her if she moves against us later.”

“I’m not subjecting the omnics on the team to this woman so you can get blackmail material!”

“‘This woman’ is a decorated RDF fighter, Morrison. Consider the idea that she may have some sense of professionalism.”

“What do you know about _professionalism_ , Reyes-?”

“‘Scuse you two?”

They’d been so intent on each other that they hadn’t heard a man wearing spurs come through the door, and that chilling realization alone breaks the argument. Both of them freeze.

“You old timers remember that this Zaryanova issue isn’t your call, right?” Jesse says coolly, tipping his hat up the better to glare down at them like a couple of squabbling cadets. “Chain of command around here says Winston makes that decision.”

Their protests tangle with each other and sputter out.

“You don’t have a problem with that, do ya?” Jesse’s drawl is syrup-slow and folksy, and Gabriel knows he’s prepared to fight.

What he’s not prepared for is the two of them staring at each other, their argument almost forgotten amidst the dawning realization that McCree is absolutely right.

“It’s not our call,” Jack says, frowning, like he can’t believe it.

“You’re not the strike commander,” Gabe agrees, blinking. “I’m not the commander.”

“...uh, Gents?”

“You’re right, McCree,” Gabriel says mildly.

“Ho shit, you two ain’t on something, are you?”

“No. You’re right, agent. It’s not our call,” Jack says. “I think we should take some time to reflect on that.”

He gets out of his chair, walks around the table, and before Gabriel realizes what he’s about to do he’s over Jack’s shoulder.

“What the hell!” McCree yelps, easily as startled as Gabriel.

But Gabriel can feel Jack’s body shaking with barely suppressed laughter as he carries him out of the room, can feel the realization crackling between them. There’s a hell of a difference between knowing a thing and internalizing it, and there’s a whole new headrush that comes from almost drowning in old pain and suddenly finding yourself safely on dry ground.

It’s not their call. They have a chain of command they actually halfway trust, allies they can depend on, and this isn’t their fucking call. Jack doesn’t have to hold up the weight of every public decision, Gabe doesn’t have to calculate how to work around it.

Gabriel feels _free._

“Carry on, McCree,” he cackles, pushing himself off of Jack’s back to toodle his fingers at the bewildered cowboy.

Jack practically struts him through the halls; he turns his head to kiss Gabriel’s hip, absolutely not caring that Lúcio and Genji are standing in the hallway to see it. Then they’re in the elevator and Jack is letting him down only so he can take him in his arms and kiss him like they’re twenty-five and sneaking off the base again.

Gabriel climbs him, wraps his legs around his waist and grinds hard into him. There’s a heat rising between them that hasn’t been there in so long… Jack’s got double handfuls of his ass, mauling him, devouring his mouth, pressing him against the elevator wall.

“Bed?” Jack pants against his mouth.

“Yes,” Gabe hisses.

Their quarters aren’t far from the elevators, thank god, someone was going to be deeply traumatized otherwise, because Jack’s just deliciously _impatient_ , almost growling with it.

They bump through the door and Gabe backs into the room pulling Jack with him by the wrists. He has to let go  to strip, more quick than teasing, and then he lets Jack pick him up and toss him onto the bed. He sprawls on the mattres as Jack shucks off his jacket and tosses it over his shoulder, as he pulls his sinfully tight undershirt up over those broad shoulders, gives Gabriel a view of his torso and the leaner muscle and the scars and the raw mean strength of him.

All Gabe is thinking is _look at you, look at you, gorgeous old beefcake, you age like fine fucking wine, look at you, look at you…_

 _Look at you_. It’s a dangerous thing to think when your body is half held together with nanotechnology and necromancy. Jack’s form blurs and then sharpens again, seen from whole new angles, Gabriel drinking in the sight of him through a dozen eyes.

Jack looks down at him and grins his sunshine grin.

“Good to know you’ve only got eyes for me,” he says, and Gabriel reaches back to wing a pillow at his head.

Jack catches it, tosses it back to join his jacket, and pounces. He straddles Gabriel’s lower legs, hands on the bed as he leans down to lick a swathe up his thigh and then tenderly kiss the eyelid of a baleful red eye cupped in the hollow of Gabriel’s hip.

“You sappy old pervert,” Gabe gasps, as Jack’s mouth sweeps up to another eye just below his ribcage. Doesn’t actually mean he wants him to stop, and Jack doesn’t, kissing a hot streak across his body, kissing each of his eyelids sweetly, ending with the one centered in his forehead.

Gabriel gets his legs up around Jack’s hips again, and…

And that day winds up being a good day.

* * *

Gabriel marks it on a calendar, the good day. He marks all of them as they come, every evening before he goes to bed. It’s a stupid counselor’s office exercise but it works. Infuriating. Good days, Bad days, Okay days.

Him and Jack, they’re not out of the woods yet, but he can see the average rising, more and more okay days. Average days. Sustainable, they can _live_ like that.

Doesn’t mean there aren’t stretches of hard days one after the other. There are times when progress stalls, or takes one step forward, two steps back. There are fights that leave the two of them feeling bruised, when Jack’s involuntary emotionlessness works Gabriel up to pure incandescent rage. Knowing Jack literally can't help being cold doesn't stop the build up of panic when he pushes, and pushes, and pushes for any reaction or any sign that Jack cares at all. They hurt each other. They have to claw their way back from the precipice too many times.

There are other conflicts. Gabriel's still not cleared for combat, because he hasn’t brought himself to go through the testing. Part of him’s still not ready to let Talon know he’s alive. Jack bites the bullet before him-- that was an argument in and of itself -- and gets assigned missions. Never against known Talon forces, but _they’re a fucking black-ops group, Jack, you’re not going to know it’s Talon until they’re pointing weapons at you-_.

He doesn’t cope well when Jack’s away.

Despite the setbacks, they are making progress, and he can prove it. No matter how bad it is in the moment.

And then comes the day Jack finds out that Jamie Morrison is in the hospital.

That day isn’t even one step forward and two steps back-- it’s one step forward and then throw the car in reverse and smash through a brick wall somewhere behind the starting line.

The first Gabe knows about it is an unwelcome voice intruding on his post-workout shower.

“Agent Reyes, Agent Morrison has fallen off my radar.”

“How-?”

“Correction: he has been located. Unused clerical office, sublevel B.”

“Status?”

“Non-responsive.”

Rinsing off isn’t fast enough. He shivers himself into black mist and lets the water go through him, purging the last of the soap in one go. It’s a deeply unpleasant feeling not unlike drowning. He resolidifies outside the tub, feeling sodden.

“Anyone nearby?”

“Agents Shimada Genji, Unit Bastion, Torbjorn Lindholm are within range. However, Agent Morrison has sealed the doors.”

“Unseal them!” He slaps off the water and staggers out, casting around for the first clothes he can find. That turns out to be a pair of sweatpants he slept in last night. They say ‘princess’ on the ass.

He’s not going to sit around with his thumb up his rectum looking for more dignified clothes.

“I am attempting to do so,” Athena responds, audibly annoyed. “He has used a legacy access code to seal the doors. I was unaware that any active agents had this code. I am attempting to bypass-”

“Wait. Does that access code control the ventilation to the office?”

“Checking,” Athena says; it’s a toneless pre-programmed automated response, the AI equivalent of a vague hand-gesture from someone trying to concentrate.

Her voice returns, triumphant. “It does _not_.”

“Pipe in something from his gym pump-up playlist and open me a path. What’s the closest access point?”

“Closest access point: HVAC vent in stairwell A,” she says. “Playlist engaged. I have informed him that you are on your way.”

The landing of the stairwell is cement and freezing under his bare feet, but he only has to feel it for a second. An air vent gapes open on the back wall just above head height; he lets himself go again, becoming soft and substanceless.

Before Jack saved him, it was a risk to do this because his body felt on the verge of just falling apart. He was more ghost than otherwise, his physical presence always seeming to hang by a thread. Now, he has the opposite problem-- he feels his substance pulling back together, just a second of missed concentration away from being Gabriel Reyes again.

Not a comfortable feeling when he’s wraithing his way through ventilation ducts that he knows are narrower than his shoulders.

He spills out into the abandoned office, shuddering as the distant parts of him snap back together like so many taut rubber bands.

Shake it off. Where’s Jack? Trail of destruction leading through the dark office, a chair on its side, a desk splintered, but no hunched up soldier in the corners. Crack of light, low-volume hip hop being piped in from somewhere-- door in the back ripped off its hinges, that’s right, the bean counters had their own private restroom.

He picks his way through the wreckage to the single-toilet bathroom, finds Jack huddling in the corner closest from the door.

“Jackie, you okay?”

A sob answers him, the ugly breathless bray of a man no good at crying. 

“What happened, babe?” he asks, falling to his knees next to Jack.

“Dad’s in the hospital. He busted up his hip working on the barn, he might not ever walk again, he still thinks I’m dead-” 

“You need to go? I’ll make it happen. Talon or no Talon.”

“Like _this_? I can’t,” Jack gasps, lifts his shaking hands as if they symbolize everything going wrong in his head. One of them is covered in dried blood, full of splinters from the broken desk. “Fuck, Gabe, fuck, he’s 86. I’m not going to be able to fix myself in time, I’m not going to get home before he-- I wasted so much time, I should have gone home, this is my fault-”

“No. Jack, come on, no. Like the tin can told you. Think about what you need to do and not what you think you should have. Come on. It’s you and me, we can make anything happen. Yesterday if we need to.”

Jack lets out another wheezing broken sound, and drops his head between his knees.

There are a few ways to reclaim a lost heart. They’re tricky.

Black-clawed fingers wrap around trembling fists, black smoke curls protectively over pale, sweating skin. Gabriel keeps Jack talking, grounds him. Warm air pours through the vents to compensate for Jack’s lowered circulation. Somewhere, Angela is on alert and waiting for them to signal her. Nearby, Genji is waiting for the door to unlock so that he can support Jack if need be.

The only way out of this for Jack is through. It doesn’t feel like it, but the grief is a step forward, a step out of the frostbitten nothing.

Gabriel hurts with him, though. It’s slow, and it’s painful.

There’s no shortcuts on this one. No songs to charm the gods, no divine fruit, no vandalism in the books of life and death that can set this right. No dark forces to steal Jack back by some old trick, because the thing trapping Jack is his own head, his own instincts.

That’s all right. Gabriel’s never trusted shortcuts.

Breath by breath, moment by moment, he goes about saving Jack Morrison’s heart the hard way.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this was A Ride. I left more than a few scenes on the cutting room floor and it still outgrew its outline. My beta Fakkin_Drongo kept at it even as I sprung two extra chapters on him, and for this I am immensely grateful. 
> 
> While I'm thanking people I have to express my sort of general gratitude to Kelly Turnbull / Coelasquid, whose work informed a lot of this (and whose R76 comic was my gateway drug to this fandom) as well as the other creators who have made wonderful things out of a slightly bonkers decentralized collection of lore. 
> 
> References if you want'm-- 
> 
> [The Coecretsquid R76 comic ](https://coecretsquid.tumblr.com/tagged/reaper76/chrono)   
> [The origin of Extremely Gaelic Jack Morrison](http://coelasquid.tumblr.com/post/162110024073/hello-friends-might-i-interest-you-in-some) / [ Part two](http://coelasquid.tumblr.com/post/162194111158/coelasquid-the-continued-saga-of-extremely) \- a man who, if he lived in an urban fantasy universe, would have learned about the fair folk on his parent's knees -oh god son I'm serious faeries are not a damn joke you need to remember all this obscure trivia.- (When in doubt, turn your clothes inside out?) 
> 
> [Fairport Convention's version of Tam Lin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy3ihk205ew)   
> [Steeleye Span's 'All Around My Hat'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zzwbYyvWiU)


End file.
